Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an ethnography of the Bolivarian University in Venezuela (UBV) and the ways in which academic intellectuals and students on this new 'Cahvista' university frame and perform the Bolivarian Revolution. I show how the 'subjects of the revolution' struggle not to create established institutional structures. Instead they consider their university community as an anti-structure to the eternal enemy of capitalism. This struggle against the institutionalization of the revolution can be seen as an attempt to preserve the stage of liminality. UBV is framed vis-a-vis a vision of the profound crisis of advanced capitalist society and in quixotic hope for emancipation of and solidarity with 'the wretched of the earth'. Yet, on the ground students and professors are entrapped in a daily struggle against the replication of the distinctions and organization structures of the same capitalist system, which the university institution has traditionally served to reproduce.