[A-List] Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power -- 1 --

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power


New Left Review 37, January-February 2006

Bolivia’s new vice-president analyses the dual crisis of his country’s
state. Exhaustion of the neoliberal primary-export model, and
bankruptcy of a ‘colonial’ republican order founded on mestizo
superiority.

ÁLVARO GARCÍA LINERA

STATE CRISIS AND POPULAR POWER

Three factors define the functioning, stability and representative
capacity of a state. The first is the overall framework of social
forces: the correlation between the different coalitions, both
dominant and subordinate, contesting the reconfiguration of what
Bourdieu called ‘state capital’—the ability to influence decisions on
matters of common import. Secondly, there is the system of political
institutions and rules that mediate the coexistence of hierarchical
social forces. In effect, this institutional framework is a
materialization of the founding correlation of forces that give rise
to a particular state regime, and the means by which it legally
reproduces itself. Thirdly, every state depends upon a structure of
common categories of perception, a series of mobilizing beliefs that
generates a degree of social and moral conformity among both ruling
and ruled, and which takes material form through the state’s cultural
repertoire and rituals.

When these three components of a country’s political life are visibly
healthy and functioning, we can speak of an optimal correspondence
between state regime and society. When one or all of these factors is
suspended or ruptured, we are presented with a crisis of the state,
manifested in the antagonism between the political world and its
institutions on the one hand, and the opposing actions by large-scale
social coalitions on the other. This is precisely what has been
happening in Bolivia in recent years. The successive uprisings and
popular upheavals that have rocked the country since 2000 may best be
understood as symptoms of a profound state crisis.

This crisis has a double character. In the short term, it is a crisis
of the neoliberal model, and the social and ideological basis on which
it has been constructed in Bolivia. But it is also, to paraphrase
Braudel, a crisis of the longue durée: an institutional and
ideological crisis of the republican state, premised since its
foundation on a colonial relationship to the indigenous majority of
the Bolivian people. Let us examine how these aspects are manifested
at the social, institutional and ideological levels in Bolivia today.

Framework of social forces

The starting point for analysis of the balance of social forces in
Bolivia since the mid-1980s is the political and cultural defeat of
the labour movement organized around the cob. [1] For decades after
the popular revolution of 1953, this had articulated the needs of a
wide front of urban and rural working classes, representing popular
demands regarding the administration of the social surplus through
structures such as union membership and workers’ joint management.
After the dispersal of this labour movement, a social bloc consisting
of business fractions connected to the world market, elite political
parties, foreign investors and international regulatory bodies was
consolidated, which then took centre stage in the definition of public
policy. For the next fifteen years, these forces became the sole
subjects of decision-making and initiative in public administration,
reconfiguring the economic and social organization of the country
under promises of modernization and globalization—first and
second-generation structural reforms, privatizations,
decentralization, tariff-cutting and so forth.

Since the turn of the millennium, this relationship of forces has been
challenged from below, and the guaranteed elitism of the
‘neoliberal-patrimonial state’ thrown into question, as new forms of
organization and politicization have reversed the footing of the
subaltern classes. The protests and road blockades of April and
September 2000, July 2001 and June 2002 signalled a regional
reconstitution of social movements capable of imposing public
policies, legal regimes and even modifications to the distribution of
the social surplus through the strength of their mobilizations. [2]
Laws such as No. 2029, which sought to redefine ownership of water,
and laws enabling the sale of state enterprises into private hands,
tax increases, etc, were annulled or modified under pressure from
social movements and popular uprisings. Presidential decrees such as
that closing the coca market or mandating interdiction in the Yungas
had to be withdrawn for the same reason. Financial legislation was
amended in line with the national demands of organized popular groups
(indigenous communities, retirees, coca-growing peasants, co-operative
miners, policemen), demonstrating the emergence of social blocs which,
at the margins of parliament, and—following the mas successes in
2002—with support from within it, have the strength to stop the
implementation of government policies, and impose the redistribution
of public resources by non-parliamentary means.

The important thing to note about these popular groupings, hitherto
excluded from decision-making, is that the demands they raise
immediately seek to modify economic relations. Thus their recognition
as a collective political force necessarily implies a radical
transformation of the dominant state form, built on the
marginalization and atomization of the urban and rural working
classes. Moreover—and this is a crucial aspect of the current
reconfiguration—the leaderships of these new forces are predominantly
indigenous, and uphold a specific cultural and political project. In
contrast to the period that opened with the 1930s, when the social
movements were articulated around a labour unionism that held to an
ideal of mestizaje, and was the result of an economic modernization
carried out by business elites, today the social movements with the
greatest power to interrogate the political order have an indigenous
social base, and spring from the agrarian zones excluded from or
marginalized by the processes of economic modernization. The Aymaras
of the altiplano, the cocaleros of the Yungas and Chapare, the ayllus
of Potosí and Sucre and the Indian people of the east have replaced
trade unions and popular urban organizations as social protagonists.
And despite the regional or local character of their actions, they
share a matrix of indigenous identity that calls into question what
has been the unvarying nucleus of the Bolivian state for 178 years:
its monoethnicity.

In addition, the elite coalition is itself showing signs of fatigue
and internal conflict. The economic programme of the past twenty
years—privatization of public enterprises, externalization of profit,
coca eradication—has resulted in a narrowing of opportunities for some
sections of the national bourgeoisie, exacerbated by the shrinking of
tax revenues owing to the growth of the informal sector. As their
long-term outlook has darkened, the different elite fractions have
begun to pull apart, squabbling over the reduction of profits
transferred to the state, the refusal by foreign refiners to adjust
the purchase price of petrol, the renegotiation of gas prices with
Brazil, [3] land taxes, etc. Their shared project of the last decade
is over.