The Making of an Interethnic Coalition: Urban and Rural Anarchists in La Paz, Bolivia, 1946-1947 (original) (raw)
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Spaces of Uneven Development and Class Struggle in Bolivia: Transformation or Trasformismo ?
Antipode, 2014
This article engages with the politics of class struggle and state formation in modern Bolivia. It examines how current forms of political contestation are shaped by the legacy of the Revolution of 1952 and the subsequent path of development. In so doing, we therefore explore spaces of uneven and combined development in relation to ongoing transformations in Bolivia linked to emergent class strategies of passive revolution, meaning processes of historical development marked by the overall exclusion of subaltern classes. With this in mind we argue that state formation in Bolivia can be read as part of the history of passive revolution in Latin America within the spatial conditions of uneven and combined development shaping the geopolitics of the region. However, the expansion of passive revolution as a mode of historical development has been and continues to be rigorously contested by subaltern forces creating further spaces of class struggle. 1 Departments are administrative/political subdivisions within which the country is divided into. 2 The history of capitalist modernity expressed through conditions of uneven and combined
Journal of Economic Issues, 2018
Over the past two decades, development economics has experienced a shift in focus from standard neoclassical analysis to institutions. While studying economic institutions is indeed important, evaluating their transformation and embeddedness is equally crucial for understanding and improving human wellbeing, especially in countries where market institutions are not fully developed. With that perspective in mind, we consider the importance of culture in the evolution of institutions in Bolivia by combining the concept of contact zones with old institutional economics (OIE). Contact zones refer to daily interactions in social spaces where culture and class meet and negotiate with each other. The contact zone between Bolivians and post-WWII development policies surfaced as an Andean collective memory, allowing for a possibility of social and political autonomy through the creation of an alternative to development, El Buen Vivir.
2012
Though underscoring the pivotal role of labor militancy in defining the Revolution, the revisionists nevertheless tended to pass off Indians as passive actors, asserting that class consciousness emerged in the countryside only once radicalized by the left. This may not be a surprising interpretation given the fact that most of this scholarship was contemporaneous with the "pacto-militar campesino." 15 Regardless, during the latter part of the decade, and well into the next, research by Jorge Dandler, Luis Antezana, and Hugo Romero revealed a long history of rural organization and social mobilization that preceded the Revolution. 16 They emphasized, above all, indigenous political agency, while underscoring the mixed legacy of the Revolution process in terms of achieving lasting social change for indigenous Bolivians. Towards the end of the 1970s, a new wave of revisionist scholarship emerged alongside the radical Indianism of Fausto Reinaga and the ethnic-based political
Social Movements and Development in Bolivia, Hydra Journal of Social Sciences
Social Movements and Development in Bolivia, 2013
Providing us with a historicisation and contextualization of Bolivia’s development of an alternative development model to neoliberalism, this paper engages with the rise in prominence of the country’s social movements and the concurrent rise of Evo Morales’ MAS party to power during the period of 2000-2005. This approach, the author argues, reflects a neostructuralist take on development, governance and political economy. The relationship between the State and Bolivia’s social movements is established and analysed, with the centrality of the latter receiving special attention. Overall, this work provides both an important grounding and analysis in the forces that have shaped the Bolivian national agenda under the MAS.
Defying Neoliberal Governmentality: The October Uprising in El Alto, Bolivia
In this Master‘s thesis I research the causes of the popular–indigenous uprising in October 2003 in the city of El Alto, Bolivia, against neoliberal policies, especially the project to allow multinational companies to sell gas through Chile. I argue that neoliberal policies attacked the subsistence bases of the people (their job sources, access to basic services such as water and electricity) and transgressed the limits of the moral economy of the inhabitants of El Alto. This moral economy was buttressed by a long tradition of unionism and Marxist ideologies as well as Andean traditions of reciprocity, communal work and ―ayllu democracy.‖ I focus on the impact of this moral economy on the neighborhood associations and its overarching organization the Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto or the Federation of Neighborhood Associations (Fejuve). These associations became sites for anti–neoliberal collective action based on grassroots democratic practices, communitarian regulation of labor and resources, and radical political consciousness fed by Marxist thought and Katarismo.
“A Fatherland worth living in”: Anarchism, citizenship and nation in Bolivia, 1900–1941
Nations and Nationalism, 2023
This paper analyses the particular role played by anarchism in early 20th century discussions concerning the Bolivian nation and citizenship. Based on a diverse corpus of documents and extended specialised literature, I will argue that between the 1920s and 1940s the local anarchist movement took part in these debates by rejecting the Creole oligarchy's definition of the nation and proposing one of its own. Ideologically, this intervention meant imagining a different, more inclusive national community made up of racialised and gendered identities. Practically, it implied fighting against internal colonialism, struggling for equal citizenship, and defending the ethnic and gender identity and human dignity of mestizos, cholas, and indigenous people. By reconstructing these debates and some anarchist “ethno-classist” struggles of the period, I approach the anticolonial orientation of Bolivian anarchism, and more generally, examine a historical experience in which subaltern subjectivities intervened in nation-building away from a statist, Western and patriarchal path.
Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia Part I
Historical Materialism, 2008
Th is 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 Bolivia’s 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.