ABSTRACT
The oil windfall brought by the oil concessions in the 1930s, and later by the oil boom that followed the nationalisation of the oil industry in the 1970s, prompted Venezuelan novelist, intellectual and politician Arturo Uslar Pietri to urge the nation’s leaders and elites ‘to sow the oil’. The slogan ‘to sow the oil’ is at the heart of enduring and conflicting views around oil in Venezuela (Pérez Schael, 1993; Pérez Alfonzo, 2011; Quintero, 2011). Uslar Pietri used farming language as a didactic device to suggest the manner in which oil should be invested, by making reference to the riches of the land rather than to oil as an immaterial and ephemeral source of wealth (Pérez Schael, 1993, pp. 199-205). During the first half of the twentieth century, foreign oil companies established in Venezuela intervened in national politics and reorganised the territory both in rural and urban areas, shaping the attitudes of subsequent generations towards the oil industry – whether national or foreign – as oil became akin to progress, development and the emerging modern nation (Tinker Salas, 2014, p. 18). In the aftermath of the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s (the period that led to the rise of Hugo Chávez), sowing oil had become an unfinished utopia. Nonetheless, Hugo Chávez’s adoption of Uslar Pietri’s slogan to baptise his national oil policy Plan Siembra Petrolera (Sowing Oil Plan) is used as a discursive construction to portray Petro-Socialism as a successful strategy for sowing oil. The Sowing Oil Plan was launched in 2005 as a 25-year strategy, but with the passing of Hugo Chávez in 2013 it seemed that only PDVSA had the means and resources to exert the Bureaucratic Power of the New Magical State. While Petro-Socialism was the vehicle to constitute the Socialist State Space, the disarticulated process to constitute the new legal instruments of the Socialist State Space enabled PDVSA to expand the Oil Social District as a dominant parallel State Space. If the city of Caracas is the material space of the state’s Bureaucratic Power, this chapter argues that PDVSA, as an instrument of Petro-Socialism, exercised its power over Caracas by envisioning the city as a Petro-Socialist urban oil field. Hence, if there is a vision of the city of the future in Petro-Socialism, then it is PDVSA (and PDVSA La Estancia) who possess the ‘magical’ Bureaucratic Power to enact it.
