[A-List] Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power -- 2 --

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

The backdrop to the current crisis of the business bloc and to the
insurgency of social movements is the Bolivian economy’s
primary-export, enclave character. [4] The fact that industrial
modernity is present only as small islands in a surrounding sea of
informality and a semi-mercantile peasant economy limits the formation
of an internal market capable of supporting value-added business
activity, even if it reduces wage costs. Vulnerability to the
fluctuations of world commodity prices is an endemic feature. In that
sense we can say that the longue durée crisis of the state is the
political correlate of an equally long-term economic crisis of the
primary-export model, which is incapable of productively retaining
surpluses, and hence unable to deploy the capital necessary for
national development. Thus the Santa Cruz Civic Committees’ proposals
for departmental autonomy, renewed every time there is a discussion
about how income from hydrocarbons is to be allocated, or the demands
for self-government by the indigenous communities, not only question
the configuration of state power, but also reveal the underlying
crisis of the established economic order.

Political institutions

Since 1985, Bolivia’s elite political parties have sought, with the
authoritarian support of the state, to substitute themselves for the
old regime of political mediation carried out by the trade unions,
which had linked the communal heritage of traditional societies with
the collective actions of workers in large-scale enterprises. The
party system, under Bolivia’s particularly skewed constitution, was
prescriptively defined as the mechanism through which the exercise of
citizenship should function. However, it is clear that the old party
groupings have not proved able to turn themselves into genuine
vehicles for political mediation, capable of channelling social
demands towards the state. They remain, above all, familial and
business networks through which members of the elite can compete for
access to the state administration as if it were a patrimonial
possession; connections to the voting masses are largely organized
around clientelist links and ties of privilege. [5]

With the syndical basis of Bolivian citizenship destroyed, and a new
form of electoral participation barely perceptible, other popular
forms of political mediation began to emerge with the turn of the
century. Social movements, new and old, have asserted their own modes
of deliberation, mass meetings and collective action. There are thus
two types of institutional system in Bolivia today. In the Chapare,
Yungas and Norte de Potosí regions, community forms are superimposed
not only on party organization, but also on state institutions
themselves, to the extent that mayors, corregidores and subprefects
are de facto subordinated to peasant confederations. In the case of
the northern altiplano, several subprefectures and police posts have
disappeared over the last three years and ‘community police’ have been
created in provincial capitals to preserve public order in the name of
the peasant federations. During the blockades that accompanied the
anti-privatization protests of 2003–05, hundreds of communities on the
altiplano constituted what they call the ‘great indigenous barracks’
of Q’alachaca, an ad hoc confederation of militant ayllus and
villages.

The Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta’s notion of the ‘apparent state’
is of clear relevance here. Due to the social and civilizational
diversity of the country, large stretches of territory and sections of
the population remain outside, or have not interiorized, the
disciplines of the capitalist labour process; they recognize other
temporalities, other systems of authority, and affirm collective aims
and values different from those offered by the Bolivian state. [6]
Through the political and economic struggles of the last five years,
these layers have undergone a process of increasing institutional
consolidation, in some cases permanent (politicized agrarian
indigenous territories) and in others sporadic (urban areas of
Cochabamba, La Paz and El Alto). As a result, the neoliberal state has
been confronted with a fragmenting institutional order and robbed of
governing authority. The alternative system, anchored in the world of
indigenous experience marginalized by Bolivia’s uneven modernization
process, is challenging the state’s centuries-long pretence at a
modernity based on texts and institutions that are not even respected
by the elites who propound them; and who themselves have never
abandoned the methods of seigneurial and patrimonial politics. The
generalized corruption in the state apparatus is nothing other than
the modernized representation of these habits through which elites in
power take on and reproduce state functions.

The liberal-capitalist political culture and institutions that are
both being overtaken by the social movements, and traduced by the
actual behaviour of the elites in power, presuppose the individuation
of society: the dissolution of traditional loyalties, seigneurial
relations and non-industrial productive systems. These processes, in
Bolivia, have affected at most one third of the population. The
Bolivian state, however, including its current ‘neoliberal’ variant,
has, as a sort of political schizophrenia, constructed normative
regimes and institutions that bear no correspondence to the ‘patchwork’
reality of our society which, in its structural majority, is neither
industrial nor individuated. The effect of the indigenous and plebeian
social movements, which in Habermasian terms stress ‘normative’ over
‘communicative’ action, is thus to call into question the validity of
republican state institutions that present a mere simulacrum of
modernity, in a society which still lacks the structural and material
bases upon which such modernity might be based.

Mobilizing beliefs

Since 1985, the ideological blueprints offered to the Bolivian
population have been the free market, privatization, governability and
representative democracy. All these proposals were illusions, but
well-founded ones, since although they never materialized in any
substantial sense, they did bring about a realignment of actions and
beliefs in a society which imagined that, through them and the
sacrifices they demanded, it would be possible to attain wellbeing,
modernity and social recognition. The upper, middle and subaltern
urban classes—the latter having abandoned all expectations of
protection from the state and workplace unions—saw in this offer a new
path to stability and social betterment.

By 2000, the gulf between expectations and realities was driving a
disappointed population into conflict with state authority. The
promise of modernity had resulted only in intensified exploitation and
an increase in informal labour (from 55 to 68 per cent in 20 years);
that of social betterment, in a greater concentration of wealth and a
refinement in forms of ethnic discrimination. Privatization,
especially of hydrocarbons, far from expanding the internal market,
has seen an accelerated flight of earnings into foreign hands. This
breakdown between official schemas and lived reality has left large
sections of the population highly receptive to new loyalties and
mobilizing beliefs. Among these are the national-ethnic claims of the
indigenous masses, which have produced a sort of indigenous
nationalism in the Aymara section of the altiplano; state recovery of
privatized public resources—water, hydrocarbons—and the broadening of
social participation and democracy through recognition of non-liberal
political practices of a collective and traditional bent (indigenous
community, union, etc). These convictions are actively displacing
loyalties to the liberal, privatizing ideology of the state.

We could say that the Bolivian state has lost its monopoly over the
capital of recognition, and that we are passing through a period of
transition in the structures of allegiance. A striking feature of the
new movements is that they dispute both the discourses of neoliberal
modernity and the founding certainties of the republican state—that
there is an inherent inequality between indigenous and mestizos, and
that Indians are not capable of governing the country. The fact that
the Indians, accustomed to giving their votes to the ‘mist’is’
(mestizos), have over the past few years voted extensively for the
emerging indigenous leaders, denotes a watershed in the symbolic
structures of a profoundly colonial and racialized society. For
indigenous social forces, the construction of urban hegemony is posed
as a central strategic task, for it is here that their identity
confronts its own hybridity or dissolution in face of the
composition—not without ambiguities—of mestizo identities, both elite
and popular.