Steve Ellner


Steve Ellner has taught economic history and political science at the Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela, since 1977. He is the author of numerous books and journal articles on Venezuelan history and politics, specifically in the area of political parties and organized labor. In addition, Ellner was a frequent contributor to Commonweal magazine beginning in the 1980s and more recently In These Times and NACLA Report on the Americas and has written op-ed articles in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He frequently lectures on Venezuelan and Latin American political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nearly all his academic works have been translated and published in Spanish. Since January 2019 he has been an Associate Managing Editor of the journal Latin American Perspectives.

Early life

Ellner was born in New York City where his paternal grandfather and grandmother arrived from Austria and Finland respectively. His grandfather, Joseph Ellner, was a writer and editor of The Gipsy Patteran. In 1954, Ellner’s family moved to Connecticut.
Throughout his university education, Ellner majored in Latin American history. He received his BA at Goddard College in Vermont, his MA at Southern Connecticut State University and his PhD at the University of New Mexico, where his advisor was the prominent historian Edwin Lieuwen. In the 1960s, Ellner actively participated in Students for a Democratic Society and later the American Independent Movement in New Haven, Connecticut and the United Farm Workers boycott committee in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Ellner is married to Carmen Hercilia Sánchez and has two children.

Academic career

In addition to being a full-time professor at the UDO, Ellner has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, Georgetown University, Duke University, Universidad de Buenos Aires, the Australian National University and Tulane University, and has taught at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. In addition to belonging to the collective of coordinating editors of Latin American Perspectives, Ellner is on the advisory board of Science and Society.

Scholarship

Ellner centered his research on the internal currents of political parties and the labor movement that often gave rise to schisms in subsequent decades. In his dissertation and subsequent articles, he traced the left-leaning factions within the social democratic Democratic Action party in the 1940s that were the seeds of splits in the 1960s giving rise to the Revolutionary Left Movement, the People's Electoral Movement and internal blocs in succeeding decades. Similarly, his Venezuela’s Movimiento al Socialismo: From Guerrilla Defeat to Innovative Politics demonstrates that the most avid and committed supporters of the armed struggle in the 1960s ended up breaking with the Communist Party of Venezuela to form the Movement for Socialism in 1971 and other parties. Ellner concludes that internal party tensions prior to the era of neoliberalism in the 1990s went beyond personality clashes and personal ambitions and had political and even ideological implications. This thesis runs counter to widely held assertions reflected in scholarly writing that political disputes within and between establishment parties in Venezuela during those years were largely devoid of issues of substance.
In several works beginning in 1989, Ellner employed the concept of “Venezuelan exceptionalism” to describe what he considered to be an exaggerated view of the attractiveness of the nation’s liberal democracy since the outset of the modern democratic period in 1958. Ellner claimed that Venezuela’s status as an oil exporter and its democratic stability convinced many scholars and Venezuelans in general that the nation was not susceptible to the military coups and political and social disorders that plagued its Latin American neighbors in the 1960s and 1970s. Ellner argued that Venezuela’s relatively high degree of social mobility did not necessarily reduce levels of social tension and conflict. He also contended that the depiction of Venezuela as a “model” or “showcase” democracy overlooked violations of democratic norms and human rights during the post-1958 period. Nevertheless, unlike Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and many of his followers, Ellner pointed to certain advances in the area of national development and social reforms, which according to him were reversed as a result of the implementation of economic policies after 1989. Other writers in the 1990s also analyzed “Venezuelan exceptionalism” from distinct perspectives.
Following the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, Ellner specialized in the Chavista government and movement. In his Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, Ellner draws on the thesis of British historian E.P. Thompson that the banners of political struggles defeated at a given historical moment often resurface many years later in revised form. Ellner traces struggles in Venezuela from the colonial period to the present and argues that grasping the importance of these experiences is essential in order to understand the Chávez phenomenon. Previously, Ellner had argued that the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by an important degree of historical continuity in spite of the major regime changes that took place during the period.
Just as he highlighted issues of substance in his analysis of party factionalism in Venezuela, Ellner argued that concrete socio-economic policies, more than Chávez’s style, accounted for the political tensions that led to the coup of April 2002. In the concluding chapter of Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, Ellner wrote: “The cause-and-effect relationship between popular and nationalist measures of an economic nature, on the one hand, and the… reaction of privileged sectors, on the other hand, was anything but subtle.”
Another thesis in his works on the presidencies of Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro concerns the challenges facing the government due to conflicting demands, interests and visions of Chavistas of different class backgrounds. Specifically, Ellner points to three social groups with a following within the Chavista movement: the organized working class, the middle class and the “marginalized and semi-marginalized sectors” consisting of members of the informal economy, workers in firms with less than about ten employees and much of the rural work force.
An additional aspect of the complexity of the Chávez phenomenon is the movement’s ties with an emerging bourgeoisie that are designed to undermine the power of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, which spearheaded two attempts to topple the Chávez government in 2002-2003. Ellner suggests that the establishment of these links, while understandable from political and economic viewpoints, is conducive to unethical conduct.
In stressing the importance of the internal diversity of a socialist movement that rejects the orthodox Marxist notion of the primacy of the proletariat, Ellner is admittedly influenced by the theories of Ernesto Laclau, who has been referred to as a “post Marxist.” In his edited Latin America’s Radical Left, Ellner and other authors examine the complexity and heterogeneity of the twenty-first century Latin American left in power throughout the continent.
Ellner goes on to argue that issues regarding the state in capitalist societies raised in the debate between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband in Europe in the early 1970s shed light on the relationship between the state and social classes in Venezuela and the predicaments facing Chavista governments. Three issues in particular stand out, namely whether the bourgeoisie displays a sense of “class-consciousness”; the viability of tactical and strategic alliances between the left and groups linked to the capitalist structure; and whether democratic socialism is to be achieved through stages, abrupt revolutionary changes, or ongoing state radicalization over a period of time. According to Ellner, Poulantzas’s concept of the state as a “strategic battlefield” lends itself to the strategy of the gradual radicalization of the state, which was advocated by some who were close to Chávez and Maduro and which was embodied in the term “process of change”.
Ellner’s two edited books on Latin America’s twenty-first century “Pink Tide,” consisting of left and center-left governments, take issue with writers who downplay the phenomenon’s long-term significance. He argues that the number of Pink Tide countries and their duration, along with expressions of unity and mutual support in the form of the Union of South American Nations and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, set them off from leftist and democratic waves in Latin America in the past, as described by Samuel Huntington.
At the same time, Ellner identifies specific junctures when Pink Tide governments failed to take advantage of their upper hand vis-à-vis adversaries in order to achieve key objectives: the deepening of the process of change; combating corruption and bureaucratic lethargy; striking blows at parties belonging to the destabilizing, “disloyal” opposition; and undertaking unpopular but necessary measures such as those designed to reduce inflation. In the case of Maduro, Ellner identifies two propitious junctures as “missed opportunities” in which the government “failed to act decisively”: following the December 2013 municipal elections won by the Chavistas by over ten percentage points; and following the opposition’s abortive attempt to achieve regime change through four months of street protests in 2014.
Elsewhere, Ellner argues that three factors contributed in major ways to Venezuela’s economic crisis of recent years: the sharp decline in international oil prices; “mistaken policies,” particularly the failure of the Maduro government to take into account market conditions in its implementation of the system of price and foreign exchange controls; and “the unrelenting hostility of internal and external adversaries, leading to international sanctions and threats of military action.” The latter factor dated back to the early years of the Chávez government. Ellner notes the implications of the debate over which of the three factors came first. The claim of opposition leaders that mistaken and incompetent decisions preceded the other two factors lead them to allege that the Maduro government alone is “responsible for the nation’s pressing economic problems, and its ouster is thus a sine qua non for overcoming them.” The argument, according to Ellner, focuses exclusively on the sanctions implemented by the Trump administration while passing over other hostile actions prior to 2016.

Awards and honors

“University Academic Productivity Prize” in the area of social sciences, granted by the university research commissions of the National Council of Universities in Venezuela, 2004.

Books