As Clear as MUD: Characteristics,Objectives, and Strategies of the Opposition in Bolivarian Venezuela

Since President Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998, the Venezuelan opposition seems to have alternated between institutional and extra‐institutional power strategies at different junctures. To help explain this pattern, this article constructs a novel theoretical framework from critical readings of both general theory and accounts of the Venezuelan opposition. It proposes that the strategies should be viewed as dialectical rather than discrete. On this basis, it finds that while the Venezuelan opposition has undergone important changes toward institutionalization in its composition, discursive emphasis, and strategic direction, close readings of opposition texts, interviews with opposition actors, and observations of street demonstrations all reveal continuity with previous rupturist and extra‐institutional tendencies. Both strategies therefore must be considered to achieve a fuller, more comprehensive vision of the Venezuelan opposition; this conclusion has important theoretical implications for the study of opposition in the wider region.     

Conflict and cohesion in the British labour party and French communist party

The article examines the differing organisational structures and political cultures which provide the bases for cohesion in the PCF and British Labour Party. It argues that the electoral decline of the two parties since the late 1960s, and the rise of new political forces to challenge their primacy on the Left, have generated growing internal conflict in each case. Despite the greater pressures towards unity in the PCF such conflicts have threatened the existing bases of cohesion in both parties. The article concludes by considering the possibilities of surmounting the current problems.     

A comment on Meillassoux and some notions about an agricultural state

Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 by Wang Yeh‐chien. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. Pp. xiii + 172, 36 tables, 7 figures.

An Estimate of the Land‐Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 by Wang Yeh‐chien. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. Pp. xi + 57, 27 tables.

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson. New Left Books, 1974; pp. 304, £5.00 and pp. 573, £8.50.

Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Margaret Spufford. Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. xxiii + 374, maps, tables, graphs; £7.70.