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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] Central Obrera Boliviana: organization of
workers from large enterprises in different branches of production. In
the wake of labour flexibilization, closures of businesses and
privatizations implemented since 1985, its social base has been reduced
to teachers, public hospital employees, university students and some
urban guilds.
[2] [In 2000, a rate hike imposed on the department
of Cochabamba’s newly privatized water supply led to massive protests,
with strikes and blockades shutting down the city. On April 4, some
100,000 strikers and protesters broke through the military cordon
surrounding the city’s central square and held a mass open-air assembly.
On April 8, Aguas del Tunari’s contract on the water supply was revoked
by the Banzer government. The same months saw the mobilization of cocaleros and
peasant colonizers against the threat of coca eradication, with
indigenous people’s organizations playing a leading role in mounting
road blockades that threatened to cut food supplies to La Paz. In June
2001 cocaleros in the Yungas valleys succeeded in driving out the joint us–Bolivian eradication force. Two months later, Banzer ceded the presidency to his deputy, Quiroga—nlr.]
[3] [The state-owned Brazilian company Petrobras is a major purchaser of Bolivian natural gas, along with the Spanish Repsol—nlr.]
[4] José Valenzuela, ¿Qué es un patrón de acumulación?, Mexico City 1990.
[5] P. Chaves, Los límites estructurales de los partidos de poder como estructuras de mediación democrática: Acción Democrática Nacionalista, degree thesis in sociology, La Paz 2000.
[6] Luis Tapia, La condición multisocietal: multiculturalidad, pluralismo, modernidad, La Paz 2002.
[7] [Protests at the Sánchez de Lozada government’s
scheme to export gas reserves through Chile (a national enemy since it
had robbed Bolivia of access to the sea in the 1879–83 War of the
Pacific), rather than process them domestically, escalated into a
full-scale insurrection in La Paz and El Alto in October 2003, ending in
the ouster of the president—nlr.]
[8] Movimiento al Socialismo: political
organization led by the indigenous peasant leader Evo Morales. Rather
than a party, it is an electoral coalition of several urban and rural
social movements. csutcb: organization of indigenous and peasant communities founded in 1979, led by Felipe Quispe.
[9] Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Oxford 1993.
[10] Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, Cambridge 1994.
[11] Anthony Oberschall, Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests and Identities, New Brunswick 1993.
[12] Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario:
nationalist party that led the popular revolution of 1952 and in the
1980s pushed through the liberal reforms of the Washington Consensus.
[13] Acción Democrática Nacionalista: party founded
in 1979 by the dictator Hugo Banzer, which he led in subsequent
elections, gaining the presidency from 1997–2001.
