Revolutionary energy in Latin America today seems to be at a lull. During the last 20 years, leftist heads of state Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa have made radical-sounding pronouncements denouncing capitalism, standing up to imperialism, and capturing the imagination of the international Left with a bit of panache. But it appears that the time of such leaders is coming to a close; Cristina Fernandez Kirchner’s chosen successor in Argentina, already a moderate choice, was defeated at the presidential polls at the end of 2015 by the notoriously corrupt right-wing politician Mauricio Macri, and shortly thereafter Venezuela’s Chavistas lost their parliamentary majority while that country’s economic crisis deepened. Do these electoral losses signal the end of the region’s revolutionary potential?
Even before these losses, left-leaning state functionaries were reducing expectations for the region’s pink tide. In 2009, Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera suggested that conditions were ill-suited for any sort of socialist revolution, and that the immediate goal in Bolivia was a post-neoliberal, Andean-Amazonian capitalism ‘focusing on the conquest of equality, the redistribution of wealth, and the expansion of rights’.1 Bolivia, along with Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil, can now trumpet some achievements along these lines, though whether these regimes are truly post-neoliberal is a point of debate. But have these gains come at the cost of all revolutionary vigor? And are they sustainable in light of the Left’s recent electoral routs?
To answer this, we might look beyond the state, to movements, margins, and social practices offering alternatives to capitalism. Raquel Gutiérrez, participant alongside García Linera in the Bolivian group Comuna, a onetime forum for theoretical work on and among Bolivian social movements, approaches the issue from an angle opposite her former collaborator. She cites ‘an exclusive epistemic disjunction between State-centered politics and autonomous politics’.2 In this view, the revolutionary potential of Latin America was never encapsulated by states or charismatic leaders, and still less by their rhetoric. The possibilities for an alternative to capitalism have always been strongest at the grassroots. This distinction, says Gutiérrez, presents itself as an irreducible political choice: on the one hand, to ‘“occupy” public posts in order to “consolidate” what has been won’ and ‘change some of the most oppressive social relations’, or on the other, ‘to develop and expand the range of autonomy in everyday life as to propel struggles and impose limits on the capitalist devastation of life in general’.3 She places herself squarely in the latter camp. Her formulation, however, likewise suggests reduced expectations. To enter the state and seek reform, or to seek reform at the level of everyday life? The shared moderation between two otherwise divergent figures casts doubt on the prospects for revolution. Where, if anywhere, are the possibilities for a further political and economic rupture? Have the achievements of the various left-leaning states set stage for further revolutionary breaks with the current order, or have they reached a dead end?
In the following, I examine the Bolivian case more closely in order to address these questions. Bolivia is arguably the most successful example among the Latin American countries that have made a left turn, facing neither economic crisis nor national right-wing political opposition. But even there the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) faced a recent defeat when their attempts to alter the constitution and permit Morales to run for a fourth term were upset in a referendum. A deeper exploration of recent Bolivian history that outlines its objective political obstacles, as well as subjective failures and missed opportunities, will permit some observations on the issue of revolutionary viability in Latin America today, as well as the meaning and strategies of revolution more generally.
In examining the shortcomings of the MAS government in Bolivia, we cannot be satisfied with explanations that attribute, for better or worse, the vicissitudes of the Bolivian political process to the class status, class origin, or ethnicity of state functionaries.4 The structure of the capitalist state exceeds the subjectivity of those who work within it, and subjectivities in any case are not easily reducible to social status on an individual basis. Nor however can we be satisfied with criticisms that view the state as a rigid functionality existing independently of social relations of power within a social formation.5 While this latter set of critics, including Gutiérrez, have raised the essential issue of autonomous movements and alternative communal practices, these social constituents must be analyzed in relation to the contingencies of a given state.
How do we understand these contingencies, then, and their relation to society? The state, in capitalism, is relatively autonomous. At a minimum, a capitalist state must create positive conditions for some stable model of accumulation; however, a state’s means of doing this, and the configuration of class fractions it includes, are contingent. This autonomy, which is neither voluntarism, nor a position of uninterested mediation between classes, can only be understood vis-à-vis relationships of social power in which a state’s role is articulated. Relative autonomy is not freedom, but a way of conceptualizing the contingency by which the state reproduces the stable conditions of capitalist production. This contingency lends itself, in certain moments, to the intervention and gains of popular classes.6
Yet the goals of the capitalist state are difficult to achieve, a fact which both conditions the positive possibilities for workers, peasants, and revolutionaries, and also places them on the edge of a void. A protest movement may spawn a left government, as in Bolivia, but the government’s duration is predicated on its success at mending the gaps in the social formation that are its own conditions: economic crisis, the fear of a military coup or foreign intervention, popular insurrection, claims of secession. The government finds itself pushed toward a policy of stabilization, constrained by the balance of power on a world, regional, or local scale, as well as by the political and ideological structures in place during the period of its ascension. As Marx writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. The question that presents itself, in such a case, is whether that government can create more possibilities for making history, more opportunities for popular intervention, to push beyond the limitations it has inherited.
A domestic political breakdown during 2000–2005 opened the door for the MAS’s election to the executive in 2006. The epoch of insurrectionary protest arose in response to the sweeping neoliberalization of the Bolivian economy in which all major political parties had participated.7 They had collaborated since 1985 to implement austerity policies, demobilize the working class, and privatize the country’s main sources of wealth: mineral mining and hydrocarbon extraction.8 When popular protests deposed neoliberal architect Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003, the political elite suffered a devastating blow – though less devastating, of course, than the 67 deaths for which his repressive reaction was responsible in the two months before his resignation.9 Then, when even his technocratic successor, Carlos Mesa, could not appease the masses, it became clear that only an outsider could hold the executive, and only on condition of a promise to nationalize the country’s extensive gas reserves.10 This pattern echoed a rejection of neoliberalism elsewhere in the region: in each case, the crisis of neoliberalism was a political crisis, the resolution of which required new parties and politicians. Be it a once-jailed military officer with a nationalist reputation like Chávez, a little-known governor like Néstor Kirchner, or even a US-educated economist like Rafael Correa, the legitimacy of these new regimes depended on their distance from the established circles of political elites. Among this wave of outsiders, the MAS had the special credibility of having actually been created by popular movements.11
Morales and his team faced considerable constraints once they took office. On the international level, despite a positive outlook for regional political and economic solidarity opportunities,12 the era of privatizations had created a massive foothold for international capital in all of Bolivia’s key sectors. The state-owned Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL) had been all but dismantled, and the mining fraction of Bolivian capital had partnered up with transnational firms to increase foreign investment, bolstered by new laws attacking worker protections, guaranteeing international investments, and expanding foreign access to the emerging hydrocarbons sector. Alongside these privatizations were loans from the IMF and the World Bank, bearing all of the terms that one would expect.13 Moreover, the international pressures were not only economic: no left-leaning government in Latin America can discount the possibility of a US-supported coup, as was attempted in Venezuela in 2002 and achieved in Honduras in 2009. Thus as the MAS took power, the constraints from the international arena were pitted against the political will of the movements which, over the course of five years, had decisively rejected the entire neoliberal model of accumulation and were demanding a nationalization of key industries.
The MAS, in addition to being subject to the conflict between popular power and the power of capital, faced liberal institutional and discursive confines. The introduction of political liberalism after democratization in 1982 contrasted with the extra-parliamentary pendulum of coups and street politics that prevailed from 1952 until the mid-1980s, when the defeat of the mining unions destroyed the traditional lever of working-class power.14 The 1990s, in turn, saw a hodgepodge of seemingly isolated political actions, but there were two decisive trends: a decentralization of the electoral structure on the one hand, and the growth of an indigenous politics of recognition, heavily media- and NGO-focused, on the other. The institutional decentralization was part of the neoliberal strategy to devolve state welfare responsibilities to so-called civil society and dilute opposition to the new policies, while the state’s discursive turn toward multiculturalism was an attempt to co-opt both indigenous political leaders and leftist intellectuals.15
This decentralization set the stage, however unintentionally, for an increase in popular organization. In particular, rural indigenous organizations flourished. The MAS itself was born as a ‘political instrument’ of the coca growers’ unions in their movement against US-sponsored coca eradication, establishing local hegemony in the Chapare region before catapulting into the national political arena in 2002. Thus, from its inception, the MAS has been a mechanism for translating popular struggles into the electoral sphere, even as its roots harken back to Bolivia’s syndicalist past. The 1990s also saw the immense growth of a number of other indigenous organizations: the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIDOB), the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), and the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) each represented thousands of insurgent agricultural workers and small peasant producers. These organizations, along with the MAS, were central to the strength of the mobilization during 2000–2005, but they were not alone; urban neighborhood associations, unions, students, civic organizations, and resource collectives all played a role.16
The local anchoring of many of these smaller organizations, however, made a nation-wide movement difficult.17 The MAS’s decisive electoral turn, which involved a reorganization of the party in 2004, therefore resolved the key strategic issue of movement unity, but the solution carried the constraints of liberalism; it dulled the edges of indigenous struggle, which in the best of cases had brought capitalism itself into question, to focus on a more general claim to indigenous recognition, increasingly bound up with a kind of nationalism.18 The point here is less to condemn the MAS for its electoral politics than to understand that while their electoral efforts resolved the issue of movement unification, they did so in a particular way, conditioned by the liberal political context.
Given these constraints, how have revolutionary hopes fared since Morales took office? Today, Bolivia’s economic model centres on the extraction and export of raw materials. With definite variation, this is the trend among most of Latin America’s left-leaning states. Some have sought to characterize this as a continuation, or reconstitution, of the neoliberal economic model that these governments were elected to oppose.19 Yet while resource extraction has long defined Latin America’s role in the international division of labour, the specific means by which these states now secure the conditions for accumulation are distinct from those of the neoliberal period.
Whereas neoliberal models in the 1990s relied on a more diverse set of exports – in tandem with attacks on the working class to keep wages low – Latin America today actually faces a ‘reprimarization’. That is, export diversity, which increased in some instances under neoliberalism, has been reduced in favour of primary commodity exports. At the same time, while there have been only limited wage increases,20 in certain cases exacerbated by inflation, all of the pink tide states in Latin America have institutionalized popular welfare programmes and worker subsidies – a significant departure from the austerity underpinning the investment attraction strategies of the 1990s. The expansion of healthcare, education, and direct cash transfers speaks to this redistribution in Bolivia.21 In Argentina, conservative president Mauricio Macri has refrained from dismantling popular transfers introduced by Fernandez de Kirchner, even expanding some, indicating a right-wing hesitation to return entirely to the neoliberal status quo ante.22 The central feature of the neo-extractive model is that these welfare programmes are directly funded by the rents on exported primary commodities, and are thus a key mechanism whereby subaltern classes are brought into the ruling coalition. In Bolivia, this has been achieved by ‘nationalizing’ the hydrocarbon industries, which in practice meant becoming the majority shareholder in shared production partnerships with the same foreign companies that previously dominated the sector. Thus, critics correctly highlight the continued presence of transnational capital in Bolivia’s extractive industries; the state has arguably increased the country’s economic dependence on resource extraction in partnership with these foreign companies, but has responded to its popular mandate by gaining a greater stake in the extractive surplus.23
At the same time, neoliberal or not, the demands of an extractive economy have created new political contradictions. As a result, the state has resorted to strategies of both repression and division – and its targets have not just been the resurgent right, but the very social movement organizations that brought the MAS to power. The famous conflict over the TIPNIS highway illustrates both of these approaches. The highway in question would be built through the Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure, which is both a protected natural reserve and a legally recognized indigenous territory. In opposition to this thoroughfare, which residents argued would be environmentally and socially disruptive, some indigenous organizations led by the CIDOB began a march in August of 2011 from the city of Trinidad to the government seat of La Paz. On 25 September, the 800 marchers were intercepted in the town of San Lorenzo de Chaparina by 500 police officers, attacked with tear gas and batons, and leaders of the march were detained. Planes from the Bolivian Air Force attempted to land in Chaparina to remove the arrested. The detained were saved by the solidarity of locals who blocked the runway and prevented the planes from touching down, then freed the marchers from the buses where they were held. When the marchers finally arrived in La Paz, the increased attention had consolidated their numbers, making them 500,000 strong.24
This first attempt to stop the highway illustrated that while the extractive model created a contradiction between the state’s developmental plans and the autonomy of indigenous peasants and workers, the latter could still depend on solidarities established during years of insurrection. Thus, when repression didn’t work, the state developed a new strategy: division. Within the TIPNIS, there are both lowland indigenous groups with long histories in the area as well as more recently settled Aymara coca producers. The former often have mixed economies of subsistence agriculture, communal farming, and some market-oriented activities, while the latter are principally dependent on the coca leaf market.25 After the government appeared to concede to the mostly lowland highway protesters in October 2011, a similar march organized by the Consejo Indígena del Sur (CONISUR), the main coca growers association in the TIPNIS, arrived in La Paz in order to demand, conversely, that the government build the road. On this basis, the state organized a ‘consultation’ of the residents of the TIPNIS, where they claimed to have found that 80 per cent of the communities consulted were in favour of the construction. In fact, according to some independent monitoring groups who sought to corroborate this claim, many communities that the government claimed to have consulted were never contacted, and of those who were, only 17 per cent came out in favour of the highway.26 But the announcement of these ‘results’ was enough to sow the seeds of division among the various communities in the TIPNIS. One group of anti-highway protesters defined the MAS strategy as such: ‘The interference of the government in the organic structures of indigenous peoples [serves] to divide us, using extortion, intimidation and criminalization of leaders and representative indigenous organizations.’27
As it stands, the highway is set to be built, but its commencement has been delayed. Whether it is ultimately constructed will be an index of the political and organizational capacity of those who oppose it. As Salazar Lohman writes: ‘The consultation proposed by the government was simply a state attempt at disarticulation and disruption of regional communitarian structures and of their historic struggle, and although in this sense this was achieved by the state, the fact that until now . . . the highway has not been built demonstrates that there exists a popular force that has been able to delay its construction.’28 That is, the delay indicates that popular movements can still serve as a potential political limit to the neo-extractive orientation of the state.
The extra-parliamentary organizations, however, face increasing challenges. The Bolivian state continues to demobilize the groups that helped bring the MAS to power. The Pacto de Unidad, in which all the major indigenous organizations pooled their power during the 2006 Constituent Assembly, fell apart in response to the TIPNIS conflict, and MASistas in both the CIDOB and CONAMAQ have managed to split the organizations into oficialista factions, who support the government and receive resources from it, and orgánica factions who oppose the MAS’s interference.29 These splits have undermined the political potential built by these organizations during 2000–2005; rather than serving as a force to advance the struggle, they have had to continually defend their autonomy against the initiatives of the state and private enterprise, designed to attract more extractive capital. It is this political decomposition, owing in part to state strategies to rout popular opposition, that is the most demoralizing feature of the current conjuncture.
Comparing the MAS to the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), which came to power in the Bolivian national revolution of 1952, we find a paradox. As Webber suggests, the MNR went quite a bit further with its promised reforms than the MAS, yet the rhetoric of the MAS is much more radical, steeped in the language of social movements, indigenous rebellion, and popular power.30 While the MNR had a left flank, its main line spoke mainly the language of moderate nationalism, even as it sought US cooperation. So how does a party with less revolutionary will become the more revolutionary party? It is a question of the social relations of power: the MNR depended upon armed, self-organized workers to defeat reactionary elements of the military when it took power, and until it supplanted those popular militias by resurrecting the discredited armed forces, it could ignore workers at its own peril. The military, that repressive arm of the capitalist state, was on the verge of permanent ruin – though once the MNR revived them, the armed forces quickly destroyed their reanimator. By contrast, while the insurrectionary power of 2000–2005 was organized and effective, the state power achieved through the MAS, even with extra-parliamentary backing, was only a small foothold from which to contend with a robust set of defences against any sort of break with capitalism.
Taking the rhetorical radicalism of the MAS at face value, this presents us with another problem: what might the MAS have done, once in power, to invigorate the political process, to radicalize its base, to open up an alternative path forward, outside the confines of an extraction-based welfare state? In other words, even granting all of the factors – all of the history weighing on the Bolivian situation as of 2006, and all of the international and national constraints of capital and the state – what were the possibilities for tipping the balance of power in favour of the masses? Looking back, we see a watershed involving a choice between two distinct approaches, two possible relationships between the state and the society, between constituted and constituent power.31 The MAS could either create opportunities for mass political intervention to push the process into uncharted waters, or it could ensure its own position by seeking out new allies and building a merely ideological set of mechanisms to activate its base.
The Constituent Assembly of 2006 was a defining moment for the question of what kind of relationship the state would have with society in the post-insurrectionary period. The demand for the Assembly went back to the 1990 March for Territory and Dignity, and with the second Gas War and the abdication of Carlos Mesa in 2005, its realization was a condition for the MAS’s rule. Owing perhaps to a recognition of its own insecurity with regard to the overall social relations of power, as well as to legislative opposition from other parties, the MAS accepted an assembly framework with limited opportunities for popular political participation. Even as the social movements, and in particular the indigenous social movements which formed the Pacto de Unidad, pledged to critically support the process, they were not actually permitted into the assembly as such – they had to stand as individuals and affiliate with a political party. And the proportional voting system, which the social movements decried, allowed an outsize minority representation for the discredited elites. Once the Assembly was in session, the movements in the Pacto de Unidad proposed their own set of amendments on key issues, but were effectively rebuffed by the MAS leadership.32
What was missed in the Constituent Assembly was a chance to open the Bolivian state to new democratic political practices, to displace the domination of liberal politics that the MAS inherited, and to create new formulas of constituted and constituent power. Indigenous communities, for instance, hoped to use their own methods of selection in order to choose their representative delegations to the legislature – that is, to participate in alternative forms of community deliberation, beyond a simple vote. They proposed a series of democratic mechanisms that may have allowed popular participation to counterbalance the weight of reaction, including immediate recall of legislators, communal assemblies, and citizen legislative initiatives. They sought to create a fourth branch of government, the ‘Social Plurinational Power’, which would be composed of representatives of indigenous nations and community organizations.33 At stake in these proposals was a step toward a proletarian state. Just as Marx drew his own vision of such a state based on the practical developments of the Paris Commune, here was a set of new, if uneven, mechanisms whereby the labouring classes could secure for themselves a weapon against their enemies.
Yet these ideas were largely excised from the final constitutional proposal. Alternative forms of delegation, though recognized in the abstract by Article 11 of the constitution, were not instituted as a means for any actual elections. The idea of special Legislative Assembly representatives for indigenous territories was deferred for future parliamentary debate, and worker, peasant, and community organizations failed to achieve institutionalized representation. The masses had offered an imaginative set of democratic possibilities that would have reshaped the entire social arena. An alliance of rural and urban indigenous groups was one pole of a social antagonism manifest at the level of the state, shaping the possibilities for the MAS as it faced increasing pressure from the right in its first term; only by marshalling that popular support could the conditions have been created for a further rupture with the old order. But the MAS chose a different route.
In describing the pink tide, one is tempted to use the term populism, understood, following Ernesto Laclau, as the suturing together of various demands into a single identity, the ‘people’, that produces a concomitant reduction of the social field into two opposing camps.34 Yet to leave things there would permit simple excuses for the democratic failures of Latin America’s left-leaning states; if the social field were so simplified, we might concede that the battle for hegemony against the right is more important than the political content of the left.35 But the real communal and popular struggles against the state belie the suggestion of both a dualistic contest, and of a subject, the ‘people’, capacious enough to encompass dissent from the left. Indeed, by creating the appearance of such a populist reduction, of a simplification of politics into a Manichean clash, the pink tide governments have strategically displaced political antagonisms arising from the neo-extractive model. Veronica Gago explains the relationship between economics, politics, and ideology that underlies the populist garb:
The relationship that the progresista governments of the region have with their populations and with natural resources is politically complex: the equation is that the primary commodities are the source of financing social subsidies. The exploitation by . . . transnationals is thus legitimized owing to a discursive state mediation that emphasizes the function of social integration achieved on the basis of the capture of these extraordinary rents. Faced with this, the attempts from below to politicize resistance against these businesses are repeatedly infantilized, or treated as irrelevant for those outside of them who hope to disqualify their critical force. . . . Indeed, what is blocked in this state refusal of legitimacy for the demands arising from the mode of accumulation is exactly the dynamic of recognition that would characterize a democracy mapping its constituent practices onto the points of antagonism.36
In other words, the contradictions generated by the model of extractivism, wherein specific groups of workers and indigenous communities bear its negative effects, are subsumed by another apparent conflict between the state and various right-wing enemies. The state can ignore one set of political antagonisms by emphasizing another, even as it seeks out ‘partnerships’ with the latter set of supposed antagonists, including transnational companies and politicians from the old neoliberal parties.37 Thus Morales and García Linera denounce all critics, left or right, as anti-Bolivian, or as imperialists, because they oppose the supposedly national-popular consensus of resource extraction and surplus redistribution – but the object of the critics is precisely the influence of the national and international right in the ‘process of change’.38 A populist political logic is certainly at play here, but it is a shock absorber for a more complex set of political conflicts. Real social antagonisms run up against rhetorical oppositions.
To ground this strategic populism, the MAS skillfully wields liberal mechanisms and plays on their limitations in order to reduce political choices and transfer them to terrain where they can win. Nancy Postero highlights a tension between liberalism and what she calls a ‘post-liberal’ emphasis on constituent power in the governing style of the MAS. According to her, the MAS’s strategy is ‘the latest attempt to make liberalism overcome its limitations, by deepening the promise of democratic participation’.39 But today this generous interpretation cannot be sustained.
In fact, the approach of the MAS is as much about limiting constituent power as about invoking it. The entire strategy is reflected in the tactic of the popular referendum pioneered by Hugo Chávez, and employed skillfully by Correa and Morales. In 2008 Morales proposed a recall referendum when the MAS was feuding with the right-wing landholding class over the finalization of the new constitution. Morales handily won his recall, and several of the opposition’s governors were ousted. Salazar points out that the effect of this was to give Morales the support necessary for completing the new constitution without bringing the masses into the street again, except in order to vote, since the indigenous organizations would likely have mobilized to demand their own constitutional proposals if they had been called to defend the Assembly.40 Through the referendum, the choice was reframed: either the MAS-supported constitution, or the intransigence of the right. Such tactics bolster liberal democratic legitimacy while also alluding to constituent power; but indeed it is only an allusion, providing no space for autonomous popular activity. The continuous electoral consolidation of the MAS – though it has recently suffered its first defeat in a vote on abolishing presidential term limits – is therefore neither an unproblematic reflection of the general will, nor, conversely, a case of some supposed false consciousness. The ‘people’ have not been duped, as an elitist trope would have it; but we must recall that the ‘people’ is always the reductive representation of a heterogeneous multitude, brandished in this case against those on the left as well as those on the right.41
Another feature of the MAS strategy of consolidation is nationalism. This theme did not originate with the MAS, of course. Even in the original insurrections of the early 2000s, nationalism played a central role. The Gas Wars were stoked by the idea that Bolivian gas would be going through Chile, an old rival according to some popular narratives of Bolivian history, and going to the US, the object of nationalist ire throughout Latin America for obvious reasons. For the MAS, this nationalist element of the insurrection has not been a problem so much as a solution – a solution for those whose task, as soon as the executive was taken, was to make Bolivia governable again. The MAS, in order to survive, needed to overcome the challenges I have already mentioned: a fragmented elite with bastions of power in regional governments, economic dependence on foreign-dominated extractive industries, a set of neoliberal cultural policies, and, of course, an organized popular insurrection from whence the MAS came. In such a context, nationalism has provided a specific way of configuring state power to overcome concrete issues presented by continuing class conflict. As Étienne Balibar argues, the nation form itself is always an ongoing ‘process of reproduction, of permanent re-establishment of the nation’:
In order completely to identify the reasons for the relative stability of the national formation, it is not sufficient, then, merely to refer to the initial threshold of its emergence. We must also ask how the problems of unequal development of town and countryside, colonization and decolonization, wars and the revolutions which they have sometimes sparked off, the constitution of supranational blocs and so on have in practice been surmounted, since these are all events and processes which involved at least a risk of class conflicts drifting beyond the limits within which they had more or less easily confined by the ‘consensus’ of the nation state.
The state effort toward building the nation, through policy and discourse, is ever renewed to address instability in processes of capital accumulation. The irony in this case is that the MAS is itself a manifestation of class struggle from below that challenged the white-mestizo conception of the Bolivian nation, posing itself as an alternative ‘dominated nationalism’, but now calling on nationalism to confine class struggle through a new consensus.42
As Kohl and Farthing argue, the articulation of nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments with demands around natural resources in Bolivia has been a powerful basis for social mobilization since 1952.43 The specific innovation of the MAS has been to employ what Silvia Rivera calls ‘strategic ethnicity’ claims to refigure Bolivian nationalism in accordance with resurgent indigenous politics. The MAS’s claim to what she calls an ‘authoritarian and idealist conception of the Nation . . . that would be in the process of consolidating itself as a primordial identity’ stands in contrast to ambiguous language of ‘plurinationalism’ which is enshrined in the constitution, yet the MAS has been able to invoke both ideas. Rivera argues that this is possible because of the prominence of 1990s neoliberal identitarian politics: ‘The state has made use of that strategic ethnicity precisely because the latter was constructed in the cultural sphere of neoliberal reforms.’ For instance, Morales’s electoral slogan ‘Soberanía y dignidad’, combines a classic watchword of the nationalist movement, sovereignty, with one of the 1990s indigenous movement, dignity. With an appeal to indigeneity as identity, or as a set of values, instead of as a concrete set of political and social circumstances, the government can recognize the many indigenous communities as part of the Bolivian nation, disregarding the real conflicts that some of these communities have with state-supported national development projects. The underlying strategy here, which manifests itself likewise at the grassroots level of political discourse, is that of ‘marking indigeneity as national and the Bolivian nation as indigenous’.44
Naturally, invocations of the indigenized Bolivian nation were important for fending off the secessionist challenge from the right in 2008. But they have likewise been used against those who protest the TIPNIS highway, against independent research organizations, against social media, against MAS dissidents, and against anyone else who opposes the plans of the state from the left.
If the right appears resurgent today throughout Latin America, this is in part because of the ambivalent positions of the state-centered left. Moderate leftism in the global periphery, balancing between popular pressure and acquiescence to international capital, tends to wear itself out; capital has little use for an ambivalent ally, and revolutionary energies wane in the face of halting political contradiction.45 While this conflict has not yet reached its denouement in Bolivia, things are coming to a head elsewhere: Venezuela is in the midst of a full economic crisis, and Brazil a political one. Notwithstanding important differences, the popular support that has carried these governments through difficult times in the past has made only a tepid appearance. And with Argentina’s Macri in office, the regional solidarity that has bolstered the centre-left in times of crisis is also in question. Bolivia too is facing a growing set of corruption-related scandals, leading the MAS to lose its bid for a constitutional amendment permitting Morales and García Linera to compete for a fourth term. This loss, however, can only be good for the chances of the Bolivian process.46 In its wake, extra-parliamentary movements and perhaps the MAS grassroots will have to consciously develop their organizational strength and reconsider their trajectory.
But what is the revolutionary path forward? Indeed, what can we learn from the pink tide about revolution and state power more generally? There is the temptation to reject the relevance of capitalist state power altogether, to lump the pink tide in with the entire history of social democratic failures and betrayals with which all Marxists are familiar, to retreat to the bitter position that the only thing the state has ever been good for is smashing. But can we afford to be so cynical? The re-emergence of parliamentary socialism in the US and the UK, the recent experience of Syriza in Greece, and the ongoing prospects of Podemos in Spain suggest that the issue of the revolutionary left’s relationship to the capitalist state and to electoral politics demands further elaboration.
Among other Marxist contributions on this point, we might look to the work of Nicos Poulantzas, which points to the double necessity of both seizing positions of state power and also changing the balance of class forces at a social level, maintaining independent political organizations outside the state, and working toward a transformation of the state’s institutional materiality. The key insight of Poulantzas is that the state is not a monolith; class conflict is rather ‘inscribed into the institutional structure of the state’ because of its own internal horizontal divisions – between branches, departments, offices, military commands, etc. – as well as its vertical ones – between officers and rank-and-file soldiers, for example, or university administrators and staff. These divisions allow, in some moments, echoes of popular will to find their way into the state apparatus, intentionally or otherwise, as ‘the establishment of the State’s policy must be seen as the result of class contradictions inscribed in the very structure of the State’.47 Through the interaction of the various departments and branches affected in different ways by class relationships, the state takes on a number of potentially conflictive projects, whose resolution constitutes its autonomy as it resolves them to reshape the means by which capital accumulation is made possible.
This conception of the state suggests possibilities for its capture as part of a revolutionary strategy that surpasses social democracy. The state is not figured here as a site for the gradual transition to socialism, and even a piecemeal acquisition of the state apparatus cannot achieve this end. As Poulantzas says in a 1976 interview by Henri Weber, ‘I do not believe that the masses can hold positions of autonomous power – even subordinate ones – within the capitalist state’. Instead, ‘they act as a means of resistance, elements of corrosion, accentuating the internal contradictions of the state’.48
The other side of a revolutionary strategy involving positions of state power, then, must be to shift the balance of class forces outside the state. What the Bolivian case further illustrates on this point is the need for a certain directionality, a constant movement by which the state is forced into a sharper articulation of class struggle on a social level. As I have argued, what has been missed in the case of Bolivia ‘is the necessity of radical transformation’ in the institutional materiality of the state – in the means and circuits through which relations of power are crystallized in a determinate social formation, and by which the state is linked to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.49 The transformations themselves would not constitute a transition to socialism, but by creating the mass basis for a political intervention, they could permit an accelerating process tending toward an actual rupture with capitalism, ‘a stage of real breaks, the climax of which – and there has to be one – is reached when the relationship of forces on the strategic terrain of the State swings over to the side of the popular masses’.50 Such was the wager of Poulantzas in any case, though in his own conjuncture Communist Parties carrying out the Eurocommunist strategy in the 1970s proved both too rigid and too opportunistic to serve as an organizational basis for these changes.51 Still, the observation that a movement toward socialism could only be founded on a transformation in the political relations between state and society itself, between constituted and constituent power – a process which must be differentiated from even major welfare-oriented policy shifts in response to popular demands – presents a resonant corrective avant la lettre of the pink tide’s current trajectory.
Of course, the distance between the institutionalized Communist Parties in Italy, France, and Spain in the 1970s on the one hand, and the emergent MAS in the context of organized, society-wide insurrection on the other, means that the underlying issues of the former cannot be transposed onto the latter – not to mention the particular challenges of building a socialist organization ex nihlio in the US, or of transforming Labour in Britain. The obstacles in each case are unique. But the distinction between a revolutionary transformation of the state and a doomed reformism cuts across all of them.
In the context of high neoliberalism that characterized the origins of the pink tide, the left in the state apparatus may have fallen prey to misconceptions about what is at stake. As Gago points out, if neoliberalism is thought abstractly as the dominance of the market over the state, then the presumed solution would be the wielding of state power to restore a balance. This seems to be the practical ideology at work among those leftists in power throughout the region. But if neoliberalism consisted, in its ascent, not of a weakening of the state, but of ‘the creation of a political world (regimen of governmentality) that arises as a “projection” of the rules and requirements of the competitive market’, then the challenge is not merely the instrumental use of state power, but an intervention in the relationship between state and society, and in the multiple ways in which power is articulated across and within the divisions implied by this relationship.52
Here, we must also emphasize that the state is, among other things, an instance of the broader social division of labour within capitalism that separates the manual from the intellectual.53 As the specific set of institutions charged with social organization, the fullest expression of the capitalist state’s intellectual function is the power of the technocracy, deepened under neoliberalism in accordance with creditor demands and at the expense of democracy. The social democratic approach to the state does not challenge this arrangement. Even when working to redistribute wealth, to regulate capital, or to bolster its organizational role in certain industries by nationalizing them, the centre-left elements in state power have tended toward technical solutions. In contrast, a revolutionary perspective on this point would have to refigure this divide: if the science of governance is an intellectual project of capital, then the science of revolution must be an intellectual project of the masses: ‘Without political and social vanguards who have the credibility to pose an alternative social project, who lack even the capacity to elaborate such an alternative, it will fall to the mobilized sectors of society . . . to reflect on whether we must be subject to definitions of reality elaborated from the spaces whose political power and control over the existing social order are currently in dispute.’54
The hope for revolution, then, resides in the possibility of distinct knowledges – and let us conceive of knowledge here in terms of material practice – functioning in tandem with the strategic corrosion of state power, and the organized, popular mobilization against the existing state of affairs. As I have argued here, the pink tide has not seen revolutionary transformation considered in these terms.
Those positions of state power are now being lost. And at the level of organization, extra-parliamentary movements, most powerful in the case of Bolivia, have proven susceptible to cooptation. Leaders who left organic organizations to become bureaucrats will find it hard to return to the grassroots, and movements depending on state resources will find themselves starved if the right continues its electoral gains.55 Important autonomies, developed in the heat of struggle, have been lost. This decomposition would seem to suggest that that the time for action has passed.
Yet if struggles that began the present cycle are any indication, sparks can fly even at the darkest hour. For if we examine what Raquel Gutiérrez calls the ‘internal horizon’ of recent struggles throughout the region, we find continuing possibilities grounded in autonomous and communal practices, concrete knowledges whose exclusion has been the tragic – or perhaps farcical – flaw of the recent cycle.56 The potential power of a collective challenge to capital remains rooted there, in ‘an extremely heterogeneous, dense, and rich web of everyday social practices, in which thousands of men and women carry out the material reproduction of their lives’.57 That is, there remains the possibility of emergent subjectivities organized on the basis of ‘communal-popular’ economic, social, and political practices. Desires for autonomy, and communal practices like the Andean ayni, an informal system of reciprocal expectation, and pasanaku, a mode of sharing common resources on a rotative basis, continue to flourish, transform, and travel throughout the Latin American subcontinent.58 Such tendencies toward ‘the production of the common in an everyday form’ hold open the possibility for political alternatives.59
Yet on their own, disperse subjectivities and practices, with often localist limitations in their practical reach, cannot substitute for a positive political project. An organized push from below, not merely in defence of stagnating governments, but in the spirit that exploded the dour consensus that ‘There is no alternative’ over the last two decades, is the only way to reset political coordinates, to unite the various strands of the anti-extractivist movement, and to displace the populist myth that there is only one alternative, centred on welfare distribution and the exclusion of popular power. This means that movements must make positive demands for political space: more power to the communes in Venezuela,60 more land for the landless movements in Brazil, more space for the self-management of unions and ayllus in Bolivia, and for the ‘taken’ factories in Argentina. All of these fragments of autonomous potential can, if organized in yet-to-be discovered ways, form a coherent counter-power to the right, and prove that the only hope to protect and deepen the social gains of the pink tide is a pivot in their direction. For now, the right is taking the initiative. The revolutionary hopes of Latin America today rely on the left doing the same.
1Álvaro García Linera, Las vías de la emancipación: Conversaciones con Álvaro García Linera, Pablo Stefanoni, Franklin Ramírez and Maristella Svampa, eds., México D.F.:Ocean Sur, 2009, pp. 74-88. Excerpt available at http://www.contextolatinoamericano.com/documentos/el-descubrimiento-del-estado/#.
2Raquel Gutiérrez, ‘Los ritmos del Pachakuti: Cómo conocemos las luchas de emancipación y su relación con la política de la autonomía’, Desacatos, 37(September-December) 2011, p. 28.
3Gutiérrez, ‘Los ritmos’, p. 28.
4Jeffery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales, Chicago: Haymarket, 2011, pp. 3, 63-4. Álvaro García Linera, ‘El Estado en transición. Bloque de poder y punto de bifurcación’, La potencia plebeya: acción colectiva e identidades indígenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia, Pablo Stefanoni, ed., Buenos Aires: CLACSO/Prometeo, 2008, pp. 397-9.
5Raquel Gutiérrez, Horizonte comunitario-popular: Antagonismo y producción de lo comun en América Latina, Cochabamba, SOCEE/Autodeterminación, 2015; Huáscar Salazar Lohman, Se han adueñado del proceso de lucha: Horizontes comunitario-populares en tension y la reconstitución de la dominación en la Bolivia del MAS, Cochabamba: SOCEE/ Autodeterminación, 2015.
6Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, Translated by Patrick Camiller, London: Verso, 2014; For more on my own interpretation of Poulantzas’ arguments in that text and their relationship the Latin American conjuncture today, in addition to what follows in the present essay, see Robert Cavooris, ‘From Subaltern to State: Toward a Left Critique of the Pink Tide’, Viewpoint Magazine, 3, 2014.
7See chapter 3 of Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance, London: Zed Books, 2006. These privatizations were carried out under the auspices of economic necessity in order to pay off the debts of the various military dictatorships that reigned from 1971 until the early 1980s. Political figures cycled and recycled through the various governments during this epoch, culminating at its most farcical in the election of Hugo Banzer, the military dictator who had been overthrown in 1978 and whose economic policies had been partially responsible for the massive indebtedness of the Bolivian economy in the first place.
8Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Álvaro García Linera, ‘El ciclo estatal neoliberal y sus crisis’, in Democratizaciones plebeyas, La Paz: Muela del diablo, 2002, pp. 12-16.
9Jefferey R. Webber, Red October: Left-indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia, Chicago: Haymarket, 2011, p. 267.
10Webber, Red October, p. 245.
11Íñigo Errejón and Juan Guijarro, ‘Post-Neoliberalism’s Difficult Hegemonic Consolidation: A Comparative Analysis of the Ecuadorean and Bolivian Processes’, Latin American Perspectives 43(1), 2016, pp. 34–52.
12Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, p. 15; Fander Falconí and Julio Oleas-Montalvo, ‘Citizens’ Revolution and International Integration Obstacles and Opportunities in World Trade’, Latin American Perspectives, 43(1), pp. 137-8.
13Brent Z. Kaup, Market Justice: Political Economic Struggle in Bolivia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 61-2, 71-89; Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, pp. 33-5.
14Álvaro García Linera ‘La muerte de la condición obrera del siglo XX: La marcha minera por la vida’, in El retorno de la Bolivia plebeya, La Paz: Muela del diablo, pp. 23-60. For a strong account of Bolivia’s pre-democracy history in English, see James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia 1952-1982, London: Verso, 1984.
15Kohl and Farthing, Impasse, pp. 131, 136-7; Kaup, Market Justice, p. 86; Nancy Postero, ‘The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia’, Latin American Research Review, 45(4) 2010, pp. 61-2; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Mito y desarrollo en Bolivia: El giro colonial del gobierno del MAS, La Paz: Piedra Rota/Plural, 2015, pp. 32-4.
16Kohl and Farthing, Impasse, pp. 132–3, 145; Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics, London: Verso, 2007, p. 104.
17Raúl Prada, ‘Multitud y contrapoder. Estudios del presente: Movimientos sociales contemporáneos’, in Democratizaciones plebeyas, La Paz: Muela del diablo, 2002, p. 107.
18Sven Harten, ‘Towards a “Traditional Party”? Internal Organisation and Change in the MAS in Bolivia’, in Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia: The First Term in Context, Adrian J. Pearce, ed., London: Institute for Study of the Americas, pp. 84-7; Rivera Cusicanqui, Mito y desarrollo, pp. 25-8.
19Maristella Svampa, ‘Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(1) 2015, p. 65; Webber, From Rebellion to Reform; Salazar Lohman, Se han adueñado.
20Falconi and Oleas-Montalvo, ‘Citizens’ Revolution’, p. 127; Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, pp. 217-22.
21Linda C. Farthing and Benjamin H. Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, Austin: University of Texas, 2014, pp. 98-113.
22‘Asignación universal por Hijo pasó de 837 persos a 966 pesos’, La Nación (Argentina), 11 February 2106; ‘Mauricio Macri anunció un aporte de $ 400 para los beneficiarios de la Asignación Universal por Hijo y las jubilaciones mínimas’, La Nación (Argentina), 21 December 2015.
23Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, p. 82; Kaup, Market Justice, pp. 28, 129-34.
24Rivera Cusicanqui, Mito y desarrollo, pp. 33, 44-5, 48; Salazar Lohmann, Se han adueñado, p. 283; Farthing and Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, p. 53; Carlos Gonçalves, Encrucijada latinoamericana en Bolivia: el conflict del TIPNIS y sus implicaciones civilizatorias, La Paz: Autodeterminación, 2013, p. 83.
25In Bolivian social discourse, Andean Aymara and Quechua rural producers who have moved to different parts of the country are often called, not necessarily pejoratively, colonizadores. The other 34 indigenous groups recognized by the constitution are primarily smaller, lowland communities. It is worth noting, in this sense, that these social divisions did not originate with the Morales government, but rather have been underlying, in some form, the political process in Bolivia for a long time. The recent migrations of Aymara and Quechua peasants, however, and their integration into the coca economy, has been an effect of the economic reorganization caused by neoliberal policies since the 1980s; Gonçalves, Encrucijada, pp. 52-65.
26Salazar Lohmann, Se han adueñado, p. 288.
27‘Manifiesto Público de la IX Marcha Indígena Originaria’, in Antología del pensamiento crítico boliviano contemporáneo, Silvia Rivera and Virginia Aillón Soria, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, p. 366.
28Salazar Lohmann, Se han adueñado, p. 289.
29Beatriz Layme, ‘CIDOB dividida por el Gobierno de Morales’, Pagina Siete (Bolivia), 25 September 2013; Nancy Vacaflor, ‘Dirigentes denuncian que el MAS busca injerencia en el Conamaq’, Pagina Siete (Bolivia), 17 September 2013.
30Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, p. 101.
31For a discussion of these concepts in the Latin American context, see Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010.
32Emir Sader, The New Mole, Translated by Ian Bruce, London: Verso, 2011, pp. 139-40; Salvador Schavelzon, El nacimiento del estado plurinacional de Bolivia: etnografía de una Asamblea Constituyente, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2012, pp. 143-7; Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, p. 86; Salazar Lohman, Se han adueñado, pp. 191-206.
33Lucía Linsalata, Cuando manda la asamblea: lo comunitario-popular en Bolivia, La Paz: SOCEE/Autodeterminación, 2015, p. 260; Asamblea nacional de organizaciones indígenas, originarias, campesinas, y de colonizadores de Bolivia, ‘Propuesta para la nueva constitución política del estado’, in Raul Prada, Horizontes de la Asamblea Constituyente, La Paz: Ediciones Yachaywasi, 2006, pp. 176, 179.
34Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005.
35See for example Marta Harnecker, A World to Build: New Paths Toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, Translated by Federico Fuentes, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
36Verónica Gago, La razón neoliberal: Economías barrocas y pragmática popular, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2015, p. 245.
37Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, p. 82; Harten, ‘Towards a “Traditional Party”’, pp. 78-9.
38Fernando Molina, ‘El gobierno boliviano amenaza con expulsar a cuatro ONG críticas’, El País, 18 August 2015; See also, for example, Álvaro García Linera, Geopolítica de la Amazonía, La Paz: Vicepresidencía del Estado, 2012.
39Postero, ‘The Struggle to Create’, p. 75.
40Salazar Lohman, Se han adueñado, pp. 209.
41This topic in political philosophy dates to Hobbes and Spinoza. The basic conceptual distinction is that the people comes into existence by and in relation to a state, whereas the multitude pre-exists, or exceeds it. Contemporarily, thinkers like Antonio Negri and Enrique Dussel have debated the merits of these concepts. See Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony, for a discussion of these concepts in relation to Latin American populism. For an alternate perspective see Donald Kingsbury, ‘Between Multitude and Pueblo: Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and the Government of Un-Governability’, New Political Science, 35(4) 2013, pp. 567-85.
42Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 60, 64-5; Étienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 1991, p. 93.
43Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, ‘Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries: The Extractive Economy and Resource Nationalism in Bolivia,’ Political Geography, 31(4) 2012, p. 225.
44The reference to ‘dignity’ evokes the ‘March for Territory and Dignity’, which set the agenda for the lowland indigenous movements throughout the 1990s. Rivera Cusicanqui, Mito y desarrollo, pp. 25, 40-41, 54; Tom Perreault and Barbara Green, ‘Reworking the Spaces of Indigeneity: The Bolivia Ayllu and Lowland Autonomy Movements Compared’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(1) 2013, p. 51.
45The contradictions of this position have many precedents in Latin America, owing primarily to the constant presence of foreign capital and imperialist political pressure. In Bolivia, for example, both the MNR after 1952 and the brief period of ‘military socialism’ from 1969-71 collapsed on the basis of similar contradictions. Claudio Katz, ‘Is South America’s “Progressive Cycle” at an End?’, Translated by Richard Fidler, posted 3 February 2016, available at: http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2016/02/is-south-americas-progressive-cycle-at.html.
46Angus McNelly, ‘The Latest Turn of Bolivia’s Political Merry-Go-Round: The Constitutional Referendum’, Viewpoint Magazine, posted 18 February 2016, https://viewpointmag.com.
47Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 125, 131, 133.
48Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The State and the Transition to Socialism’, in James Martin, ed., The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State, London: Verso, 2008, p. 337.
49Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Interview with Stuart Hall and Alan Hunt’, Marxism Today, July 1979, p. 196; Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, p. 44.
50Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 258-59.
51Asad Haider, ‘Bernstein in Seattle: Representative Democracy and the Revolutionary Subject (Part 2)’, Viewpoint Magazine, posted 23 May 2016, https://viewpointmag.com.
52Gago, La razón neoliberal, p. 219.
53Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 55-6.
54Decio Machado, ‘Ecuador y el ocasio de los dioses’, Contra/Tiempos, posted 20 May 2016, available at: https://contratiemposec.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/ecuador-y-el-ocaso-de-los-dioses/.
55Linsalata, Cuando manda la asamblea, p. 261.
56Gutiérrez Aguilar, Horizonte, p. 22.
57Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra. ‘Actualidad de la revuelta plebeya: Por una nueva política de autonomía’, Lobo suelto!, posted 1 July 2015, available at: http://anarquiacoronada.blogspot.com/2015/07/actualidad-de-la-revuelta-plebeya-por.html?q=mezzadra.
58Gago, La razón neoliberal, pp. 298-9.
59Gutiérrez Aguilar, Horizonte, p. 119.
60See George Cicariello-Maher, ‘Building the Commune: Insurgent Government, Communal State’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(4) 2014.