Jeffery R. Webber

Struggles against accumulation by dispossession in Bolivia : the political economy of natural resource contention

David Harvey suggests that, compared with struggles waged by traditional political parties and labor unions, struggles to “reclaim the commons” typically result in a less focused political dynamic of social action, which is both a strength and a weakness. While these social movements draw strength from their embeddedness in daily life, not all manage to make the link between the struggle against accumulation by dispossession and the struggle for expanded reproduction that is necessary to meet the material needs of impoverished and repressed populations. Social movements in Bolivia have framed their demands differently in the struggles against the privatization of natural gas and water depending on the different roles these resources play in the region’s political economy. Struggles against the privatization of natural gas pose a greater challenge to neoliberalism because of their macro frame and politics.

Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia

Acknowledgements Acronyms 1. Politics of Indigenous Resistance and Class-Struggle 2. Indigenous Insurgency, Working-Class Struggle, and Popular Cultures of Resistance and Opposition, 1781-1964 3. Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Popular Struggle, 1964-85 4. Neoliberal Counterrevolution, 1985-2000 5. Left-Indigenous Insurrectionary Cycle, 2000-3 6. Red October: Gas-War, 2003 7. Carlos Mesa and a Divided Country: Left-Indigenous and Eastern Bourgeois Blocs in the Second Gas-War of May and June, 2005 8. Combined Oppositional Consciousness 9. Conclusion: Bolivia, Venezuela, and the Latin-American Left Appendix A. Formal Interviewees Appendix B. Methodology References Index

Carlos Mesa, Evo Morales, and a Divided Bolivia (2003—2005):

During the short-lived government of Carlos Mesa (October 17, 2003—June 6, 2005), Bolivian society was intensely divided along the lines of class, race, and region. Out of this context, two social blocs emerged: a left-indigenous bloc, constituted by worker and peasant organizations based in La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, and Chuquisaca, and an eastern-bourgeois bloc, constituted by groups representing agro-industrial, financial, and petroleum capital in the Departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando, and Beni. The Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism—MAS) party and fractions of the middle class were oscillating forces that belonged to neither side. Mesa attempted to play a mediating, Bonapartist role between the social blocs but ultimately failed, and his government collapsed. Thus the stage was set for Evo Morales’s successful bid to become the country’s first indigenous president in the elections of December 2005. Understanding this decisive interval in Bolivian history is crucial for fully coming to terms with the reformist character of the Morales government today. The nonrevolutionary trajectory of the MAS administration since 2005 should not have come as a surprise given the extensive collaboration between Morales and the neoliberal regime of Mesa directly prior to the former’s ascent to office.

Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. Part I: Domestic Class Structure, Latin-American Trends, and Capitalist Imperialism

This article, which will appear in three parts over three issues of Historical Materialism, presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year (January 2006–January 2007) of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the class structure of the country, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers, at a general level, the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. These considerations are then grounded in analyses of the 2000–5 revolutionary epoch, the 18 December 2005 elections, the social origins and trajectory of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) as a party, the complexities of the relationship between indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation, the process of the Constituent Assembly, the political economy of natural gas and oil, the rise of an autonomist right-wing movement, US imperialism, and Bolivias relations with Venezuela and Cuba. The central argument is that the economic policies of the new government exhibit important continuities with the inherited neoliberal model and that advancing the project of indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation will require renewed self-activity, self-organisation and strategic mobilisation of popular left-indigenous forces autonomous from the MAS government.

Evo Morales and the political economy of passive revolution in Bolivia, 2006–15

Abstract While the government of Evo Morales rules in the name of indigenous workers and peasants, in fact the country’s political economy has since 2006 witnessed the on-going subjugation of these classes. If the logic of large capital persists, it is legitimated in and through petty indigenous capitalists. This article argues that Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of passive revolution offers a superior analytical point of departure for understanding contemporary Bolivian politics than does Álvaro García Linera’s more widely accepted theory of creative tensions. However, the dominant manner in which passive revolution has been employed in contemporary Latin American debates has treated the socio-political and the ideological as relatively autonomous from the process of capital accumulation. What is necessary, instead, is a sharper appreciation of the base/superstructure metaphor as expressing a dialectical unity of internal relations between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, thus avoiding one determinism or another. Through a reading of Gramsci that emphasises such unity, this article interrogates the dynamics of ‘extractive distribution’, class contradictions of the ‘plural economy’, and transformations in the urban labour market which have characterised Bolivia’s passive revolution under Evo Morales between 2006 and 2015.

The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum

The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has reignited debate in Latin America and internationally on the questions of socialism and revolution. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different revolutionary traditions and introduces their reflections on class-struggle, the state, imperialism, counter-power, revolutionary parties, community and communes, workplaces, economy, politics, society, culture, race, gender, and the hopes, contradictions, and prospects of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’ in contemporary Venezuela.

Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. Part III: Neoliberal Continuities, the Autonomist Right, and the Political Economy of Indigenous Struggle

This article presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year (January 2006–January 2007) of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the changing character of contemporary capitalism imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers at a general level the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. Part III examines the complexities of the politics of indigenous liberation and the political economy of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) government between January 2006 and January 2007. It pays special attention to the limits of reform in the hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil) sector. Also explained in Part III is the formation of an autonomist right-wing movement in the eastern lowlands, and how the new Right has intervened in the process of the Constituent Assembly. The article shows how the actual Constituent Assembly set into motion by the Morales administration in 2006 differs in fundamental terms from the revolutionary assembly envisioned by leading left-indigenous forces during the cycle of revolt in the first five years of this century.

Indigenous Struggle in Latin America: The Perilous Invisibility of Capital and Class

Gerlach, Allen. Indians, Oil, and Politics: A Recent History of Ecuador. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index, 286 pp.; paperback

Canadian Geopolitics in Post-Coup Honduras

23.95. Postero, Nancy Grey, and Leon Zamosc, eds. The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 272 pp.; hardcover

Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development , Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008

67.50, paperback