[A-List] Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power -- 4 --

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

The present political period in Bolivia can best be characterized as a
revolutionary epoch. Since 2000, there has been a growing
incorporation of broader social sectors into political decision-making
(water, land, gas, Constituent Assembly) through their union,
communal, neighbourhood or guild organizations; there has been a
continual weakening of governmental authority and fragmentation of
state sovereignty; and there has been an increasing polarization of
the country into two social blocs bearing radically distinct and
opposed projects for economy and state.

At one pole, the fundamental nucleus is the indigenous movement, both
rural (peasant) and urban (worker) in composition; this clearly
represents a different political and cultural project for the country
to any that has previously existed. The economic programme of this
pole is centred on the internal market, taking as its axis the peasant
community, urban-artisanal and micro-business activity, a revitalized
role for the state as producer and industrializing force, and a
central role for the indigenous majority in driving the new state. At
the other pole is the ascendant agro-export, financial and petroleum
business bloc, which has played the most dynamic role in the
liberalizing sectors of the economy. This bloc has a clear image of
how Bolivia should relate to external markets and of the role of
foreign investment, and it favours the subordination of the state to
private enterprise and the preservation, or restoration, of the old
political system. Anchored in the eastern and southeastern zones of
the country, beyond the current organizational reach of the social
movements, it deploys an openly racialized discourse.

This political polarity is this further structured by three underlying
cleavages: ethno-cultural (indigenous/qaras-gringos), class
(workers/businessmen) and regional (Andean west/Amazonian crescent).
In the case of the ‘left’ pole, the mobilizing identity is
predominantly ethno-cultural, around which worker identity is either
dissolved (in a novel type of indigenous proletarianism) or
complements indigenous leadership at a secondary level. For the ‘right’
pole, mobilizing identity is primarily regional in nature; hence the
importance of the Civic Committees, agitating for regional autonomy,
for these conservative forces.

This polarization has led to a dissociation between economic dominance
and political dominance, creating a period of instability since the
components of power are divided between two different zones, neither
of which has any immediate possibility of displacing the other.
Economic power has moved from west to east (reinforced by foreign
investment in hydrocarbons, services, agro-industry), while the
sociopolitical power of mobilization has been reinforced in the west,
giving rise to a new geographical uncertainty at the level of the
state. The interesting thing about the ‘paradox of October’, the
period opened up by the insurrection that overthrew Sánchez de Lozada,
is that this regional separation simultaneously expresses a
confrontation of sharply differentiated ethnicities and classes:
businessmen in the east (Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija), and the indigenous
and mass sectors in the west (La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, Oruro), both
waiting to pounce on a state administration which, in territorial,
social and cultural terms, can no longer express the new economic and
political configuration of Bolivian society. It is true that there are
businessmen, indigenous, mestizos, workers and peasants in every part
of Bolivia; but the ascendant discourses and identities articulated
within each region are differentiated by these class, ethnic and
territorial roots.

Overall, the map of sociopolitical forces in Bolivia shows a highly
political field, with tendencies on both sides pushing for solutions
through force, either by coup d’état (mnr) [12] or insurrection
(csutcb/cob), or through electoral resolution, either via a
restoration of the old regime (adn) [13] or its progressive
transformation (mas). None of these tendencies has yet managed to
construct a bloc with a majority over the other components, still less
over the other sections of the population that would be indispensable
for a social leadership capable of a long-term hold on state power.

>From the point of view of the social movements and their prospects for
an indigenous-popular transformation of the state, there are two
alternatives: a path of gradual, institutional change by electoral
means led by Evo Morales, and an insurrectional path for the
revolutionary transformation of the state. The first would require the
construction of an electoral bloc around Morales, negotiated with
other leaders and social movements, that would be strong enough to
generate a unified popular and indigenous pole with the ability to
rule. The broad social backing needed would require proposals for
change robust enough to attract those urban sectors—middle-class,
upwardly mobile popular, and even business layers linked to the
internal market—who are at present reluctant to accept an indigenous
governmental solution, and without whose support an indigenous
electoral triumph would be rendered unviable.

The two paths, electoral and insurrectionary, are not necessarily
antagonistic; they could turn out to be complementary. On both,
however, the indigenous-popular pole should consolidate its hegemony,
providing intellectual and moral leadership of the country’s social
majorities. There will be neither electoral triumph nor victorious
insurrection without wide-ranging, patient work on the unification of
the social movements, and a practical education process to realize the
political, moral, cultural and organizational leadership of these
forces over Bolivia’s popular and middle strata.

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