The Partisan
MrZine have published an essay "Once Again on So-called "Extractivism"", which is an extract from a longer essay, "Geopolitics of the Amazon" by Bolivia's Vice-President Álvaro
García Linera. This is a commentary on the "Extractivism" essay,
perhaps with a view of writing more about some of its themes. As a
commentary it does not aim to be critical of García Linera's text,
merely to try to understand it, its place within some of his other works
and its relation to certain tendencies and arguments within Marxism.
All unreferenced quotes are from "Once Again on So-called
"Extractivism"".
Modes of Production and Totality
Perhaps the first thing that will strike a European reader of García
Linera’s text is that a senior politician has written a text which is both
unapologetically Marxist - the essay begins with an exegesis of the meaning of
“mode of production” in Marx focusing particularly on the relation to nature –
and of a rare theoretical rigour ambition, aiming both to clarify certain
theoretical issues in Marx and intervene in a crucial argument in contemporary
Bolivian politics. Of course, the particular unity of theory and practice
entailed by leading politicians producing valuable theoretical work (Lenin,
Trotsky, Bukharin) or leading theorists taking up important political posts
(Korsch, Luxemburg, Lukács) was not alien
to Europe in the Russian revolution or the central European revolutions
following it but it is a link has now long gone.
García Linera’s initial focus on the totality of the “mode of
production” feels similarly alien and perhaps even old-fashioned. In “Marxism and Postmodernism”, Jameson argues that late capitalism makes analysis in terms
of mode of production difficult, drawing on the pre-Marxist history of the
concept, particularly in the Scottish Enlightenment, Jameson argues grasping
the mode of production relies on uneven development, “distinct and coexisting
modes of production are registered together in the life world of the thinker in
question” and that 18th century Scotland saw the “coexistence of
radically different zones of production and culture.” Jameson contrasts 18th
century Scotland and 19th century Europe for Marx with today with the
postmodern rejection of totality grounded in a “purer and more homogenous
expression...from which many of the hitherto surviving enclaves of
socio-economic difference have been effaced by way of their colonisation and
absorption by the commodity form.” In “State Crisis and Popular Power”, written
before the election of Morales as President and
García Linera as vice-President, García Linera writes, “due to the
social and civilisational diversity of the country, large stretches of
territory and sections of the population remain outside, or have not
interiorised, the disciplines of the capitalist labour process; they recognise
other temporalities, other systems of authority, and affirm collective aims and
values different from those offered by the Bolivian state.” The externality of
large sections of the Bolivian population to the capitalist labour process and
the aims and values of the (old) Bolivian state, that is the coexistence of
different modes of production registered by García Linera is the condition of
possibility of representing capitalism as a mode of production. This point may
be taken further, and it could be argued that an encounter with the
non-capitalist productive processes in the Third World may be the only way capitalism
can be represented and we can continue to be Marxists in any real sense in
Europe.
García Linera’s (transhistorical) definition of production and its
focus on the human relationship to nature mirrors, quite precisely, Marx’s in
the Grundrisse, “the most modern
epoch will have a few definitions in common with the others...all production is
the appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and by means
of a specific form of society.” Alongside its impeccable orthodoxy, the
insistence on nature within this definition of production is strategically
important, forming the basis of a critique of, on the one hand, the almost
kitsch construction of an unproduced, unhistorical “nature” prior to
capitalism, which underpins the arguments of those critiquing the MAS government’s
“extractivism”, hence the insistence on the transformations of the Bolivian
landscape by pre-capitalist forms of production, and, on the other, the
banishment of nature from certain pseudo-Marxist technocratic and imperialist
conceptions.
Marx, himself, in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”,
insists, “labour is not the source of wealth. Nature is just as much the source
of use-values” and, “And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature,
the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner,
treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values,
therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely
ascribing supernatural
creative power to
labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows
that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all
conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made
themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work
with their permission, hence live only with their permission.” Benjamin
develops the implications of this, “Technical developments counted to them as
the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this,
it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path
of technological progress represented a political achievement. The old
Protestant work ethic celebrated its resurrection among German workers in
secularized form. The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress]
already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all
wealth and all culture.” Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being,
who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, “must be the slave of
other human beings, who... have made themselves into property-owners.”
Oblivious to this, the confusion only increased, and soon afterwards Josef
Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times... In the...
improvement... of labor... consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill
what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what
labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect
workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to
perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression
of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found
in Fascism. Among these is a concept of nature which diverges in a worrisome
manner from those in the socialist utopias of the Vormaerz period [pre-1848].”
García Linera and the Marx's Letter to Zasulich: Against Žižek
It
is important to insist on García Linera’s impeccably orthodox Marxism in the face of
slight suspicion that the argument “the big difference that separates
these environmental transformations from those that capitalism introduces to
nature today is that the non-capitalist societies provided for the reproductive
capacity of the modified environment and the continuity of what existed...
Capitalism, in contrast, reverses the reference coordinates of the environment
with society” expresses a sentimental, conservative anti-modernity. Žižek attempts a
critique along these lines of Morales, arguing his interventions on climate
change represent an “ideology implying a return to [a]...prelapsarian
substantial unity”, relying on “in a simplistic way on the narrative of the
Fall which took place at a precise historical moment...Fidelity to the
communist ideal means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut être absolument moderne”. (First as Tragedy Then as Farce, pp. 96-7) It is, however, Žižek who is
being simplistic and unMarxist. García Linera’s text explains the
destruction of nature that is inherent in capitalism through the contrast
between use-value and profit, the link between this and the destruction of
nature is explicit in Capital, the
capitalist “insofar as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not
the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and
augmentation of exchange values” and “capitalist production...only develops
techniques and the degree of combination of the social processes of production
by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and
the worker.” It is also worth noting García Linera absolute materialism, the
human relation to nature through production determines consciousness, “the organic
and living conceptualization of nature that characterized these societies is
derived from this manner of transforming it for collective purposes.”
The next point to note against Žižek and in favour of Morales
and García
Linera surrounds the question of modernity. The Bolivian anti-capitalist
position is absolutely not a species of “feudal socialism”, “comic because of
its total incapacity to grasp the course of modern history”, because both the
pre-capitalist forms of production still exist in Bolivia, García Linera is not
a melancholic talking about a return to something long gone, the condition of possibility, following
Jameson, of García Linera’s grasping of modes of production and they are
potentially more benign than feudalism. It might be added here that Žižek
Eurocentrism, which is the problem here, may be one of the reasons he is
consistently incapable of conceptualising and analysising contemporary
capitalism as a mode of production, instead, in his work, “capitalism” functions
as at best a name (at worst an empty, extravagant shibboleth) that divides by
naming the limit of non-Communist politics, the point where certain antagonisms
cannot be resolved, but there is never any possibility of an analysis of
capitalism.
García Linera has written on Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich (for García Linera on the letter see Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, pp. 256-63) and
it is letter which shows, ultimately, Žižek’s Eurocentricism is a travesty
of Marxism, except for Marx’s deeply problematic comments on India, such as,
“we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though
they may appear, had always been the foundation of Oriental despotism, that
they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass making it
the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules,
depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies...England, it is true, in
causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest
interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the
question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental
revolution in the social state of Asia? If not whatever may have been the
crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the
revolution” the technocratic and imperialist tendency that has so damaged the
European left. In the Zasulich letter Marx insists he, in Capital, “expressly limited the ‘historical inevitability of [the
genesis of capitalist production through the expropriation of the agricultural
producer] to the countries of Western Europe”. Marx then notes that Russia may
be able to escape the long, violent arduous transition to capitalism as the
necessary (in Western Europe) precondition for Communism and the “dissolution
of archaic types of communal property”. Marx continues, the peasant commune,
“may gradually detach itself from primitive features and develop directly as an
element of collective production on a nationwide scale”, even more important
for the analysis of García Linera’s text and the Bolivian situation, Marx
continues, “it is precisely thanks to its contemporaneity with capitalist
production that it may appropriate the latter’s positive features without
experiencing all its most frightful misfortunes.” On Marx’s
letter, García Linera has written, “what is needed to ‘salvage’ for our
actuality the communal form in those places where it has been preserved on the
national scale is to ‘develop’ it by transforming it into the ‘direct starting
point’ for the construction of a new system of social organisation based on
communitarian-universal production and appropriation.” (quoted in Bosteels, p. 258) Bosteels notes how
the critiques from opponents of Morales- García Linera from the left (opponents
who now are critiquing the current Bolivian state’s “extractivism”), “frequently
take the form of a surprised discovery of Marx’s drafts and letter to Zasulich,
which are then turned back against the Bolivian Vice President as if the latter
had not devoted hundreds of pages to the continued relevance of this
correspondence.” (p. 260)
Against the critics of "Extractivism"
Two of the most useful pieces
setting out this line of critique available in English are Raquel Guttiérez’s Guardian article, “Lithium:the gift of Pachamama” and, despite an extremely suspect reading of Walter
Benjamin and lapsing into a certain Trot by numbers analysis (“Thanks to Alex Callinicos...for
suggestions on an earlier draft of this article”), Jeffery R. Webber’s
“Revolution against ‘progress’: the TIPNIS struggle and class contradictions inBolivia”. García Linera
summarises the position of those attacking the Bolivian state for
“extractivism” “which is said to maintain activity harmful to nature and to
seal its dependency on world capitalist domination”. To this characterisation
of the critique it is necessary to add (and García Linera, to some extent, also
addresses these points) that it is said that (Guttiérez) “progressive nationalist policies find themselves in conflict
with a highly politicised population with its vision of how best to utilise the
gifts of Pachamama (Mother Earth)”, or Webber, “the maintenance of an extractivist economy of natural
resource extraction and capitalist agriculture geared towards export under the
MAS government has necessarily meant repeated clashes with the hunger for land
expressed by poor and landless peasants, as well as those indigenous
communities rising up in defence of forests, natural resources, water and
biodiversity.” Webber is also critical in a claim which is almost precisely the
inverse of Žižek of the repetition of the
Stalinist logic of the old Bolivian Communist party in insisting on the
necessity of a complete transition to capitalism as the precondition of
establishing Communism. The most useful way of proceeding with García Linera’s defence may be to suggest that his
argument is rooted in the capacity of the radically transformed Bolivian state
to maintain and develop political temporalities at odds to capitalism.
As we have seen,
García Linera,
following Marx, insists that all production makes use of and transforms nature
and even early agrarian societies “had some type of specialised extractivist
activity.” García Linera also argues, again, despite Žižek’s attempted critique,
following Marx that capitalist production is essentially destructive of nature,
within this argument he also makes an important point about “sustainability”
within capitalism, “destroying, protecting,
pillaging, conserving are simply collateral, interchangeable components within
a single social purpose: profit, the uninterrupted and infinite valorization of
capital.” Finally, he insists on the capitalist mode of production as a dynamic
and systematic totality on a global scale, a thought which, paradoxically, is
to some extent predicated on the continuation of non-capitalist modes of
production in Bolivia, as Jameson argues, on capital’s becoming all-embracing, “where
everything is henceforth systematic the very notion of a system seems to lose
its reason for being”. These three
arguments provide the basis for the beginnings of the defence against the
critics of Bolivia’s “extractivism”.
Firstly, the
identity of extractivism with environmental destruction does not hold, García Linera makes the obvious
point that the countries whose greenhouse gas emissions are causing global
warming are precisely those that, within their national economies, have moved
towards, and the influence of autonomia is
evident here, “production of ideas and symbols.” Neither does the overcoming of
extractivism mean the overcoming of capitalism, otherwise “the United States would be the
first communist country in the world”. Any consideration of capitalism on a
global scale, which would necessarily entail addressing the continued reliance
of the advanced capitalist countries on extractivism and other forms of
material labour elsewhere, would suggest that a break with extractivism without
a break with capitalism would be impossible. The subordinate (i.e. continued
reliance on extractivism and agriculture) status of many of the societies of
Latin America and Africa is determined both by colonialism and its legacy and
capitalism, by capitalism reconfiguring itself geographically based on “profit
rates, access to markets, availability of labour force and natural resources.”
García Linera’s
argument then becomes that it is capitalism as a mode of production that must
be overcome if environmental destruction and Bolivia’s subordination are to be
overcome. Furthermore, even “in the future construction of a communitarian mode of production,
in which the whole of the common resources, material and immaterial, are
produced and administered by the producers themselves” and the critical use of
utopia to estrange the present is important here, “there will exist some
countries and regions that are extractivist”, presumably determined solely by
availability of natural resources as without a neo-colonial capitalist global division
of labour there would be no question of profit rates, access to markets and,
probably, availability of labour forces. Those criticising Bolivia’s
extractivism, by contrast, are opposing it with a strange, voluntaristic fusion
that overcomes the global division of labour of abstract primitivism, imagining
Bolivia’s pre-capitalist forms as islands totally detached from global
capitalism and abstract futurism, here the different legacy of autonomia in
García Linera’s critics is central, that identifies post-Fordism with the
overcoming of capitalism. Instead, for García Linera “the central debate for the revolutionary
transformation of society is not whether or not we are extractivist, but to
what degree we are going beyond capitalism as a mode
of production --
whether in its extractivist or non-extractivist variant.”
Marx himself, in
the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of TheCommunist Manifesto insisted that, as in the Zasulich letter, whilst
communal peasant production could provide the basis for Communism this would
require a revolution against capitalism in Western as well. This argument
mirrors Marx’s mockery, which is mentioned by García Linera of utopian
socialists like Cabet, “who thought they could create social
"islands" that would be immune from relations of capitalist
domination”. Read with García Linera on pre-capitalist formations in Bolivia
and Jameson’s conception of the “utopian enclave”, this argument suggests a
potentially profitable opposition between utopia as enclave and utopia as
island. (Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 10-21) of the Following Marx’s mockery, García Linera suggests an identity between
ultra-leftism and Stalinism in arguing for the possibility of the establishment
of Communism in one country, a position shared by left critics of Bolivia’s
extractivism.
Against this
abstract utopianism, which, as Richard Fidler in his introduction to
"Geopolitics of the Amazon", appeals particularly to leftists in the
‘First World’, García Linera argues all genuine revolutionary processes
are
situated, crucially, and it is also striking to see a sitting
Vice-President,
praise Mao or Lenin so matter-of-factly, he states, “the revolutionary socialist processes that
developed over the last 150 years have inherited as a condition of possibility
and limitation -- during the time they existed -- this location in the
international division of global labour. The Paris Commune, the Soviet
Republic in the time of Lenin, or Mao's China, did not break with this
worldwide material base. They could not do that. Instead, what they did
was to take as their point of departure their location in the division of
labour and the level of their productive forces, so that from there they could
begin to revolutionize the internal economic structures through a long process
of socialization of the conditions of production, and to promote an even
greater and longer process of revolutionary transformation of international
economic relations.”
Socialism and Autonomia: García Linera and Negri
The acknowledgement
of the necessity to overcome capitalism on a global scale as well as the length
of the struggle is not, however, defeatist, there are always struggles and
potentialities, as García Linera
writes, “while there is a general
predominance of capitalism, within it there are glimmers and tendencies of
struggles of a potential new mode of
production that cannot exist locally, and can only be present as just that: a tendency, a
struggle, a possibility, for its existence is conceivable only on a worldwide geopolitical scale.” There is a similar version of this in "Marxism and Postmodernism", "mode
of production is not a ‘total system’ in that forbidding sense, and
includes a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself". In this attention to the
possibilities of a new mode of production that are present within capitalism, García
Linera comes closest to making use, as he has before, of Negri. Bosteel’s
writes of García Linera’s past “doctrinaire autonomist allegiances to the work of Toni Negri.” (p. 247) These allegiances
have become substantially less doctrinaire as García Linera has developed an argument for the
necessity of state power albeit one rooted in autonomist conceptions, “What can be done from the state
in function of this communist horizon? To support as much as possible the
unfolding of society’s autonomous organisational capacities...To broaden the
workers’ base and the autonomy of the workers’ world, to potentialize forms of
communitarian economy wherever there more communitarian networks,
articulations, projects.” (quoted in Bosteels, p. 247)
García Linera’s
break with Negri’s work is a question of the state and, perhaps even more
significantly, of socialism. García Linera’s “Socialism is dead? Idiots!...Socialism is not the
ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the
practical movement of the common struggles of living labour in communitarian
form to recuperate its expropriated capacities” (quoted in Bosteels, p. 251-2) is obviously a long way from Goodbye Mr. Socialism, although García Linera’s conception of
socialism, including the extremely useful definition given in this text, is a
long way from those conceptions and practices which cause Negri to reject
“socialism”. García Linera draws on Balibar’s argument in On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat - From Marx to Mao (and “The Critique of
the Gotha Programme”, which is Balibar’s starting point), “socialism cannot be a classless
society...Socialism can only be a society in which every form of exploitation
is on the way to disappearing, to the extent that its material foundations are
disappearing” and its consequent rejection of both Kautsky and Plekhanov’s
deterministic conceptions which rely upon positing socialism as a mode of
production like capitalism and communism and the utopian argument that an
immediate move from capitalism to communism is possible. (pp. 139-40) For García Linera then, “Socialism is
not a new mode of production that would coexist alongside capitalism,
territorially contesting the world or one country. Socialism is a battlefield between capitalism in crisis and
the tendencies, potentialities and efforts to bring production under community
ownership and control. In other words, it is the historical period of
struggle between the dominant established capitalist
mode of production and another potentially new mode of production. The only mode of production that will overcome capitalism is
communism, the assumption of community ownership and control of production of
the material life of society...But until that happens the only thing that is
left is the struggle.” García Linera’s definition of
socialism essentially presents socialism in opposition to both defeatism and an
infantile or quietist utopianism, it also suggests the openness history and a
certain independence, but not primacy, of politics (against Plekhanov and
Kautsky, but also against Negri’s naming of socialism as an imagined “just and
egalitarian management of capital”, (Goodbye Mr. Socialism, p. 18) socialism is a politics not an economics),
emerging from the contradiction between the possibilities of a new world and
capitalism in crisis. The state here is
part of the struggle but it is not the only are even the most important part.
The “progressive nationalist”, as
Raquel Gutiérrez describes it in her
criticism, function of the
state in García Linera’s
work is, firstly is to modify extractivism by the use made of surplus., although she is critical describes this as the
“progressive nationalist” aspect of the Bolivian project. As García Linera argues this is
vital both because the concrete improvements to very poor people’s everyday
lives matter, stopping producing would “drive the people into even greater
misery”, which would lead, inevitably, to the return of the right, “behind the
recently constructed "extractivist" criticism of the revolutionary
and progressive governments, then, lies the shadow of the conservative
restoration.” Finally, over a longer period of time the state allows the
creation “of a new material non-extractivist base that preserves and amplifies
the benefits of the labouring population.”
In passing, it’s worth noting
that in Ecuador and Haiti there have been far left groups who have supported
right-wing coups and US “intervention”, often with US funding. Aristide has
commented, in an interview with Peter Hallward, on the disruption caused by Batay Ouvriye, “you
need to look at where their funding comes from. The discourse makes more sense,
once we know who is paying the bills. The Americans don’t just fund political
groups willy-nilly”, Hallward adds, “particularly
not quasi-Trotskyite trade unionists.” Even more tellingly in Ecuador, the
Pachakutik party, attacking the Correa government from a position similar to
the critics of the Morales government for “extractivism”, and, possibly, funded
by USAID, backed the 2010 coup. Supporting the argument that the critique of
“extractivism” is becoming used by western liberals to discredit the
progressive and revolutionary governments of Latin America, The Guardian ludicrously exaggerated the
challenge posed by Alberto Acosta from the Pachakutik party. In the
Presidential election Acosta obtained 3% of the vote. However, whilst left-wing
groups together with NGOs have had this function, the question still remains
how to deal with class contradictions and antagonisms within the left and
within the Bolivian revolutionary process, García Linera has written of “creative tensions” and it’s worth
remembering Mao’s distinction between contradictions among the people and
contradictions between us and the enemy.
State, Temporality and Development
The function of the state in
García Linera is to, a large extent, allow a different organisation of time to
capitalism. Samir Amin argues in The Law of Worldwide Value, that the “mastery of social development by society itself implies a considerably
longer time prospect than that of capitalist calculation, the rationality of
which appears, in this respect, to be relative and short-term.” (p. 96) Part of this
argument and its application to Bolivia is derived from the character of
capitalism and, as Amin points out suggesting the necessity of the
“wealth/value distinction emphasised by Marx” (p. 102) to the development of ecological
thinking but Amin and García Linera’s
conceptions are also specific to extraction for export. For Amin, as in García
Linera’s contrast between the transformation of nature in capitalist and
pre-capitalist forms, much of the question surrounds capitalism’s inability to
provide for the “reproductive capacity of the modified environment". In Amin the
contradiction is between mining capitalists who must “be sure to put aside an
amount sufficient to allow them to continue their activities, at the same rate
of profit when the mines become exhausted” and the community, for whom “the
cost of this exhaustion of resources is quite different.” (p. 96) In “State Crisis and Popular Power”, García
Linera introduces another aspect that is particular to extraction and which
echoes another theme in Amin’s analysis, the old primary export (i.e. an
extractivism untransformed by the progressive nationalist state of today) model
of the Bolivian state was “incapable of productively retaining export surpluses and hence unable to
deploy the capital necessary for national development.” This inability was a
question both of Bolivia’s position in the international division of labour
(its ability to extract rent) and its internal politics (the use made of that
rent), as Amin argues, “what use, in fact, is to be made of the rent by the
countries that would be its beneficiaries obviously depends on the nature of
the classes in the dominant position” and writes of the “countries of the
Persian Gulf [where] the rent quite simply goes to feed the globalised
financial market controlled by the imperialist oligopolies” and countries where
(and today Venezuela would be the obvious example) “the rent is put to use for
development, even capitalist development...[and] conflict becomes inevitable.” (p. 109)
Amin’s argument and the politics
of Venezuela under Chávez suggest a strange disjuncture over the question of
“reformism”. On the one hand Chávez’s economic policies were largely (but not
exclusively) policies of capitalist development, on the other they required a
radically transformed and, in many ways, revolutionary albeit authoritarian
state form to cope with the inevitable conflict. The direction of Bolivia’s
economic policies, whilst still in some ways, insofar as the category is
meaningful, reformist implies a deepening that would become revolutionary both
in purely economic terms and in their transformation and even overcoming of the
state. However, despite the aim to eventually overcome the state García Linera argues, against,
for example, Raquel Guttiérez, that it was
necessary to take state power as part of the 2000-5 struggle.
Whilst some victories could be won over neoliberalism
from outside the state these victories were primarily (although not entirely)
defensive, García Linera writes of the “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”. However, in order to organise
a different logic of temporality to neoliberal extractivism taking state power
was necessary.
It was also necessary to take state power in order
to prevent its recuperation by the right and to further transform the state
itself. García Linera in "State Crisis and Popular Power" suggests that even the
victories won prior to MAS’s election victory transformed the dominant state
form, their recognition of the social blocs “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.” However, this transformation was not
necessarily enduring and the victories won could, in future, easily be
reversed. Following Marx on the “revolutionary epoch”, García Linera argues, that the revolutionary epoch does
not last, “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.” Alongside, the productive role of the state, which
includes its potential self-overcoming, which has already been discussed, the
other striking element that bears on García
Linera’s “extractivism” essay, particularly the brief mention of “the Bolivian
Democratic-Cultural Revolution” or the “plurinational state” is the
foregrounding of “culture” in “multicultural political forms” and
“communitarian-indigenous institutions.”
Cultural Revolutions
The wider context for this
foregrounding of “culture” in the broadest possible sense of the word is the
untenability of a traditional workerism rooted in the urban (and thus
relatively privileged) unionised working
class holding “to an idea of mestizaje”.
Strangely, as in the UK, the 1980s saw the almost total defeat of the Bolivian
Trade Union movement, with its “social base reduced to teachers, public hospital employees, university
students and some urban guilds”. This collapse of traditional Trade Unionism
led to, as García Linera
writes, “subaltern urban
classes...having abandoned all expectations of protection from the state and
workplace unions, saw in this offer [i.e. the offer of growth through
neoliberalism] a new path to stability and social betterment.” As it became apparent
that this offer was empty, the traditional mediations of political parties and
Trade Unions were unable to challenge the neoliberal state. The collapse of
Bolivian Trade Unionism (i.e. of reformist mediations) led to a gap for the
left but, unlike in the U.K. the opening caused by this collapse allowed a
recomposition of radical and progressive forces around “culture” as much as
around “class”. Part of the Bolivian Cultural Revolution then is the
privileging of culture and its link to a semi-autonomous politics (socialism), “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.” In Bolivia “indigenous” more
than working class names the part of no part, the part that cannot be absorbed
without radically transforming the state, it cannot be absorbed into either the
neoliberal nor the colonial-republican state, “premised since its foundation on
a colonial relationship to the Bolivian people”
The other crucial dimension of “culture” is the
centrality of education and the development of capacities for popular control
of production. This is the non-reformist and non-stageist aspect of the defence
of extractivism as a starting point, not only does this allow a surplus to
redistribute and the development of the productive forces to allow more surplus
and the reduction of environmental impacts but it also “equips society with
greater technical-productive capacity to control the overall productive
process.” This development of technical-productive capacities in a way that
will move beyond the state is another aspect of the state’s solving of
temporality, the aim is “creating the
cultural, educational and material conditions to democratize control of the
common wealth, even to the point of going beyond the state institutions by
establishing community ownership and control of property and social production
itself within a perspective of deepening social mobilization and gradually
overcoming extractivism. In the process, it is necessary at the same time
to build a new technological base for production of wealth that will help to
overcome extractivism.”
The Long Revolution
The affinity between García Linera and Williams makes clear that the processes that are beginning in Bolivia are radical both in terms of the degree of change and its depth and breadth. It also makes clear that changes like these take time, it is a question of, in Brecht and Benjamin’s version of “The Long Revolution” (which can be deployed against Webber’s use of Benjamin), a “war of attrition”, “That yielding water in motion/ Gets the better in the end of granite and porphyry./ You get me: the hard thing gives way!”
Republished from The Partisan
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