[A-List] Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power -- 3 --

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

In Bolivia, then, the pillars of both the ‘neoliberal’ model and the
republican state have deteriorated rapidly. It is this conjunction of
crises that helps to explain not just the radical nature of the
political conflict over the past five years, but also its complexity
and irresolution. Such crises cannot endure for long, because no
society can withstand long periods of political vacuum or uncertainty.
Sooner or later there will be a lasting recomposition of forces,
beliefs and institutions that will inaugurate a new period of state
stability. The question for Bolivia is what kind of state this
mutation will create. There could be increased repression, leading to
the introduction of a ‘neoliberal-authoritarian’ state as the new
political form, which might perhaps solve the crisis of the courte
durée, but not that of the longue durée, whose problems would soon
manifest themselves again. Or there could be instead an opening of new
spaces for the exercise of democratic rights (multicultural political
forms, combined communitarian-indigenous and liberal institutions) and
economic redistribution (a productive role for the state,
self-management, etc), capable of addressing both dimensions of the
crisis. In the latter scenario, a democratic resolution of the
neoliberal state crisis will have to involve a simultaneous
multicultural resolution of the crisis of the colonial republican
state.

Hegemonies, Zavaleta argues, can grow tired: there are moments when
the state ceases to be irresistible, when the population abandons the
ideological frameworks that allowed it to accept the elite’s ordering
of society as desirable. The uprising of October 2003 was the maximal
expression of the masses’ dissent from the ‘neoliberal-patrimonial’
state, and hence of the exhaustion of its form of hegemony. [7] If
each state crisis generally goes through four phases—manifestation of
the crisis; transition or systemic chaos; conflictive emergence of a
new principle of state order; consolidation of the new state—October,
with its hundreds of thousands of Indians and urban masses in revolt
in the cities of La Paz and El Alto, and its culmination in the flight
of President Sánchez de Lozada, inescapably marked the Bolivian state’s
entry into the transitional phase. The initial acceptance of the
constitutional succession of Vice-President Carlos Mesa was due not so
much to deference towards parliamentarism as to a popular attachment
to the old prejudice of the personalization of power, the belief that
a change of personnel is in itself a change of regime. But there was
also a certain historical lucidity with regard to the further
consequences implicit, given the present correlation of forces, in the
abandonment of liberal-democratic institutions.

But if there can be no state domination without the consent of the
dominated—progressively eroded in Bolivia since the blockades of
2000—there can be no successful opposition without the capacity to
postulate an alternative order. This is precisely what the insurgents
discovered: they were able to paralyse the state with their blockades
but were unable to put forward an alternative and legitimate power
project. Hence the ambiguous and confused truce of the Mesa period
(2003–05), during which the distinguished broadcaster attempted to
channel the insurgents’ minimum programme (resignation of Sánchez de
Lozada, constituent assembly, new hydrocarbons law), while leaving in
place the entire governmental machinery of neoliberal reforms.

Revolutionary epochs

It was Marx who proposed the concept of the ‘revolutionary epoch’ in
order to understand extraordinary historical periods of dizzying
political change—abrupt shifts in the position and power of social
forces, repeated state crises, recomposition of collective identities,
repeated waves of social rebellion—separated by periods of relative
stability during which the modification, partial or total, of the
general structures of political domination nevertheless remains in
question.

A revolutionary epoch is a relatively long period, of several months
or years, of intense political activity in which: (a) social sectors,
blocs or classes previously apathetic or tolerant of those in power
openly challenge authority and claim rights or make collective
petitions through direct mobilizations (gas and water coordinadoras,
indigenous, neighbourhood organizations, cocaleros, small-scale
farmers); (b) some or all of these mobilized sectors actively posit
the necessity of taking state power (mas, csutcb, cob); [8] (c) there
is a surge of adherence to these proposals from large sections of the
population (hundreds of thousands mobilized in the Water War, against
the tax hike, in the Gas War, in the elections to support Indian
candidates); the distinction between governors and governed begins to
dissolve, due to the growing participation of the masses in political
affairs; and (d) the ruling classes are unable to neutralize these
political aspirations, resulting in a polarization of the country into
several ‘multiple sovereignties’ [9] that fragment the social order
(the loss of the ‘authority principle’ from April 2000 till today).

In revolutionary epochs societies fragment into social coalitions,
each with proposals, discourses, leaderships and programmes for
political power that are antagonistic to and incompatible with one
another. This gives rise to ‘cycles of protest’, [10] waves of
mobilization followed by withdrawals and retreat, which serve to
demonstrate the weakness of those in power (Banzer in April and
October 2000 and June 2001; Quiroga in January 2002; Sánchez de Lozada
in February and October 2003). Such protests also serve to incite or
‘infect’ [11] other sectors into using mass mobilization as a
mechanism to press their demands (teachers, the retired, the landless,
students). At the same time, these mobilizations fracture and
destabilize the social coalition of the ruling bloc, giving rise to
counter-reactions (the so-called business-civic-political ‘crescent’
in the east of the country), which in turn produce another wave of
mobilizations, generating a process of political instability and
turbulence that fuels itself. Not every revolutionary epoch ends in a
revolution, understood as a change of the social forces in power,
which would have to be preceded by an insurrectionary situation. There
are revolutionary epochs that lead to a restoration of the old regime
(coup d’état), or to a negotiated and peaceful modification of the
political system through the partial or substantial incorporation of
the insurgents and their proposals for change into the power bloc.