Constituent Moments,Constitutional Processes

Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes

If the existing institutional apparatus—seemingly the only concern of those upholding the good-left-versus-bad-left thesis—can be described as “constituted power,” then what I hope to emphasize by contrast is the constituent moments, the periodic irruptions of social movements and spontaneous masses into political life from below, as well as the processes of (re-)constitution that often follow on their heels, in which new constitutions are drafted in an attempt to transform the constituted order. While the language of constituent versus constituted power has come into vogue largely as a result of thinkers like Antonio Negri (1999), here both the context and the content of constituent and constituted power fall closer to what the Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel terms potentia and potestas, respectively. For Dussel, constituent power (potentia) is a power pertaining to the people, which he understands as a social bloc comprising those oppressed by and excluded from a constituted political system (potestas) (2008: 78). He thus both endows “the people” with a specific class content it often lacks (the economically oppressed) and also crucially stretches the term to encompass other forms of exclusion and oppression (be they race, gender, age, disability, etc.). More specifically, Dussel argues that when a particular arrangement of constituted power loses its progressive function and becomes an oppressive fetter, we find the emergence of what he terms “hyperpotentia.” Assuming the form of the “state of rebellion,” this hyperpotentia is the moment in which those oppressed and excluded people explode into history, reminding constituted power of its constituent source and setting into motion political transformations (81–82). When I speak of constituent moments I am referring to these rebellions, and when I speak of constitutional processes I refer to the transformations they provoke in the constituted order.

In the past, many radical leftists and social democrats alike have shared an exaggerated emphasis on the towering heights of political power: whether it was the revolutionary imperative to seize the state with the force of arms or the reformist insistence that such seizure occur at the polls, the eyes of many were trained upward. Not so today. As I show in my history of revolutionary movements in Venezuela, the past five decades have seen a slow and occasionally painful process whereby many elements on the radical left have been forced by failure to relinquish their vanguardist tendencies and embrace more bottom-up transformative processes and more directly democratic governing structures (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013). Pushing beyond the vagaries of Lenin’s proletarian “semi-state,” some see these radical constitutional processes as a way to set in motion the “withering away” of which he spoke. Rather than mere seizure of the state, then, this new Latin American left faces a more dialectical challenge in which forces from above and from below confront one another in the effort to “renew the constitutional order while also sustaining a creative constituent process of democratic experimentation and innovation” (Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg, 2009: 321).

This relationship between constituent moments and constitutional processes, however, is not without its complexities and even contradictions, as constitutional processes necessarily tend toward a weakening, an undermining, or a watering down of the explosive rebelliousness that served as their raison d’être: “If movements incarnate constituent power that parties subsequently channel and represent as constituted power, what is at stake is the extent to which this representation is a negation of the energies that drive the left turns, and the extent to which state institutions can fulfill their promises and desires” (Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg, 2009: 328). This tension, however, is not sufficient to reject the transition from explosive moment to transformative process, shunning the state entirely and fetishizing the sporadic appearance of constituent power. As Dussel reminds us, “The process of passing from a fundamental moment (potentia) to its constitution as an organized power (potestas),” despite constituting a “supreme danger to politics and the origin of all injustice and domination,” nevertheless remains indispensable (Dussel, 2008: 19–20). Against those like John Holloway (2002) who would insist on changing the world “without taking power,” the objective is instead to subject constituted power to constant constituent pressure, binding the two in a dialectical chain toward ever more radical and direct representation. ²

Once we refocus our attention on constituent moments and constitutional processes, the broad distinction between the good and the bad left would seem, at least initially, to carry some weight, since such moments generally occurred within the bad left. In the countries directly under consideration here, such constituent moments include the massive and largely indigenous rebellions in Ecuador (1990, 2000, 2005) and Bolivia (2000–2003, 2005), the Venezuelan Caracazo (1989) and popular response to the brief coup against Chávez (2002), and the anti-neoliberal rebellions in Argentina (late 2001–2002) that gave rise to the slogan “¡Que se vayan todos!” ³ In Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, however, constituent pressure did not stop after the unseating and replacement of traditional political leaders at the polls (1998 in Venezuela, 2006 in Bolivia, 2007 in Ecuador) but pressed forward into the partial reconstitution of the institutional sphere through the drafting and ratification of new constitutions (in Venezuela in 2000, in Bolivia and Ecuador in 2008). ⁴ But lest we be tempted to endorse this binary through a simple reversal of polarity between those Castañeda considers “good” and “bad,” closer attention to the constituent-constituted distinction, rather than upholding such a binary, initiates its breakdown.

What’s so Good about the “Good Left”?

The contradictions of the good-left-versus-bad-left binary are clearly on display when we turn to the ostensibly “good.” Once we focus our attention on constituent power and social movements, rather than a clear opposition we find instead a spectrum in which relations to social movements move from bad to worse, with Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet occupying the latter column. In the aftermath of Pinochet’s rule, social movements that had been besieged (and nearly exterminated) under the military regime confronted an additional challenge in the top-down politics of the predominant Concertación, and as a result their influence continued to decline despite the nominally democratic opening (Carruthers and Rodriguez, 2009; Petras and Leiva, 1994). This relative weakness of social movements notwithstanding, the Bachelet government was assailed from a variety of directions: from workers for only lukewarmly supporting the struggle of miners at La Escondida, from students for the steady decline in Chilean public education and the “Penguin” movement against the constituted structures of Pinochet-era education (which has more recently come to a head under Bachelet’s successor, Sebastián Piñera), and above all from Mapuche indigenous movements, which accused Bachelet of continuing the racism and state terrorism of previous administrations (Acuña, 2007; Carruthers and Rodriguez, 2009). In each of these cases the complaint was essentially the same: despite popular constituent power pressing demands from below, Bachelet was unwilling to confront the entrenched constituted power and thereby proved a disappointment to right and left alike.

In Brazil, by contrast, Lula rode to power on the strength—not the weakness—of social movements like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement—MST). But, in contrast to many social movements, the MST would not prove easy to defeat or co-opt, and tensions between it and Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) were evident even before his election in 2002. In fact, it was precisely Lula’s effort to cultivate an image of pragmatism and moderation that led him to condemn the radical tactics of the movement from the campaign trail (Folha de S. Paulo, 2002). It was only after his election, however, that Lula’s pragmatic rhetoric would take the form of moderate, centrist policies that included fiscal restraint, export-oriented development, and resistance to significant agrarian reform. This pragmatic turn toward the “good left” marked a clear abandonment of the constituent base symbolized by the MST and other radical grassroots movements. As a result, several leftist critics were expelled from the PT in late 2003 and the MST ramped up land and building occupations in 2004 (Branford, 2009).

Beyond merely raising the question of what is good about a “good left” that abandons its organized base, the case of Lula undermines the binary entirely. Whereas Castañeda’s “bad left” allegedly maintains its power through a clientelistic system of handouts, such a description would apply far better to Lula’s Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program than to its counterpart in Venezuela’s missions, which combine social support with political education, job training, and the empowerment of women and underrepresented ethnic groups (see also Raby, 2006: 52). This is because the logic of radical constituent movements cuts directly against efforts to placate the masses with populist handouts. Notably, however, Castañeda interprets Fome Zero and its Bolsa Família stipend program as “innovative” and even “neoliberal,” despite critiques of the programs by a World Bank official (2006: 36; Duquette et al., 2005: 194).

Further, given Castañeda’s sharp criticism of populists engaging in empty symbolic conflicts with the U.S. government, it is worth recalling the tit-for-tat dispute over diplomatic reciprocity regarding tourist visas and security checks for travelers arriving in Brazil from the United States. But lest we attribute this to a merely selective reading of the cases, I want to insist that it is far more systematic than that, as Castañeda’s also excuses “a certain neglect of democratic practices” under Lula in Brazil as well as the fact that Vázquez in Uruguay “rails against neoliberalism and Bush” in a manner suggestive of the populism he so scorns in Chávez and Morales (2006: 38). While the latter are condemned on the grounds that their “rhetoric is more important than substance,” Castañeda goes so far as to celebrate Vázquez’s bait-and-switch (attacking the empire in public while negotiating free-trade agreements in private). In the end, the “populists” are derided for their empty promises, the “good left” celebrated when it successfully tricks the people. ⁵

The distinction between good and bad lefts teeters on the point of collapse when it comes to former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner, whom Castañeda describes—with no apparent irony—as “a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case” of “bad left” populism (39). While we might wonder how a single case could possibly serve as both an ideal type and its opposite, it becomes clear upon closer investigation that Castañeda’s difficulty is not a categorical one but a question of the content of his categories. Despite macroeconomic successes on a par with those of the good left, Castañeda simply cannot bring himself to praise a Peronist, and so he turns to speculation about what Kirchner might do if left to his “Peronist chromosomes” (40). Once we discard such assumptions about what an individual’s political DNA might produce, focusing instead on the dynamic conflict between constituent and constituted powers, a different picture comes into view. Kirchner himself rose to power in large part as the almost accidental result of the massive constituent earthquake of late 2001 in the most unexpected of ways: few would have expected Kirchner, an ostensible “insider” candidate, to turn toward the social movements in the way that he did, thereby earning the scorn of Castañeda and others. By contrast, ostensibly “outsider” candidates like Brazil’s Lula and, to a lesser degree, Chile’s Bachelet gained a coveted position in the “good left” only by either turning their backs on the movements that brought them to power (in the case of Lula) or breaking promises to the movements (in the case of Bachelet).

What unifies this good left with its bad counterpart is the fact that no leader can afford to neglect the extrainstitutional space of constituent power and social movements. Whether it be Chilean students and Mapuches, Argentinean piqueteros and factory occupiers, or the Brazilian MST, the challenge is the same. It should therefore be no surprise that, once we look more closely at how these regimes confront from above the challenges posed from below, Castañeda’s framework disintegrates. Moreover, if a key element of the good/bad distinction is the emptiness of the promises made, then surely no left is worse than one that abandons or betrays its base once in power, and yet such betrayal seems to be a sine qua non for entry into the good left. Certainly, there remains the question of what is in fact possible given a particular constellation of constituent and constituted powers, especially with regard to the legacy of the Southern Cone dictatorships. This does not, however, foreclose the decision whether to give in to the imperatives of entrenched power or to seek to counterbalance them by shoring up the support of social movements from below.

Dissecting the “Bad Left”: Ecuador and Bolivia

If the good-left-versus-bad-left distinction is arguably reversed in the betrayal of social movements, the same can be said with regard to the presence of constituent moments and constitutional processes. It was generally among the so-called bad left that the people rose up most recently and most spectacularly, and it was in the bad left that those rebellious outbursts fueled processes aimed at transforming the state apparatus. While we might be justified in having reservations about the effectiveness of this change and the degree to which it has strengthened movements through empowerment or weakened them through co-optation in particular cases, it is undeniable that in the bad left, to paraphrase C. L. R. James, the Latin American masses have come closest to power (James, 1963: 138–139). But if this distinction breaks down upon second glance—and again around the case of Argentina’s 2001 constituent rebellions, which did not yield substantive constitutional transformation—we might ask what light this lens of constituent moments and constitutional processes sheds once focused on the bad left itself. More specifically, what has been the relationship between governments and revolutionary social movements since the elections of Chávez in 1998, Morales in 2005, and Correa in 2006? Once we move beyond the mere question of the existence of explosive constituent moments and constitutional processes, looking instead to the intricate relationship and dialectic between movements and state, we again find not simple homogeneity à la Castañeda but a complex constellation comprising struggles from below, governing strategy from above, and the unpredictable dynamic that plays out both between the two and in opposition to the forces of reaction that confront both simultaneously.

Few would deny that, if we are speaking of the relationship between governing regimes and radical movements among the bad left, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has by far fared worst. In Ecuador as elsewhere, the macroeconomic and social crisis imposed from above by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s corresponded with the flourishing of social movements building alternatives from below. In Ecuador as elsewhere, the end of this “lost decade” corresponded with a moment of radical constituent rupture in the form of the Inti Raymi uprising in June 1990, which followed Venezuela’s Caracazo by scarcely a year. In contrast to the Caracazo, this rebellion and those that followed were primarily indigenous in their constituency and demands: while indigenous leaders in the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador—CONAIE) and other indigenous groupings made a series of cultural, economic, and political demands—among them the recognition of Ecuador as a “plurinational” state—the rank and file acted directly on José Carlos Mariátegui’s (1971: 22) dictum that “the problem of the Indian” is a problem of land, demanding radical agrarian reform and seizing haciendas to drive the point home.

The “seismic shift in consciousness” that this irruption of indigenous people into the previously inaccessible public life of the nation represented was followed in short order by a protest march known as the caminata from the eastern lowlands and by struggles sharing their timing and motivating concerns with the Zapatista rebellion. In the aftermath of this chain reaction of constituent rebellions, Ecuador had developed what could be considered the most powerful indigenous movement in all of Latin America, with CONAIE in many ways standing at its head (Becker, 2011: 34–37). Projecting these constituent victories into the realm of constituted power would prove more difficult, however, raising questions of how movements from below relate to state power from above that continues to plague movements in Ecuador and beyond. The immediate response of the movements to their newfound success was the reversal of CONAIE’s long-standing ban on political participation with the 1995 establishment of the Pachakutik Movement as its political wing. But what seemed logical to many amid the upsurge soon led to disillusionment with elected officials who—in an echo of the good left—abandoned their radical constituents immediately upon coming to power.

Elsewhere this disillusionment might have been the end of the story, but in Ecuador the power gleaned by indigenous movements in the successful street mobilizations of the early 1990s translated into a further series of constituent moments in which mass action in the street deposed a series of leaders. From Abdalá Bucaram (1996–1997) to Jamil Mahuad (1998–2000) to the unsuccessful street mobilizations against Gustavo Noboa in early 2001 and the removal of Lucio Gutiérrez in May of 2005 by the forajido or “outsider” movement (albeit without much indigenous participation), movements continued to prove their strength from below. ⁶ Despite continued rebellions in the street, all was not positive in the realm of constituent power, as these shows of strength occurred against the backdrop of disillusionment with the movements and political organizations that had supported Gutiérrez, with CONAIE and Pachakutik paying dearly for their dalliance with constituted power.

This series of rebellions and radical direct actions was constituent not merely in its form but also in its objectives, as amid these actions the demand to rewrite the country’s constitution was an occasionally invisible thread. But in this, too, activists found only partial success in a 1998 constitutional reform that remained superficial and partial and even facilitated further neoliberal reforms. As Rafael Correa’s 2006 electoral campaign gained steam, the call for a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s Magna Carta represented a point of coalescence for movements from below. Correa was slow to embrace the demands of social movements, and many have argued that even when he did so his methods were opportunistic and his goal co-optation rather than empowerment. This was arguably the case with the Constituent Assembly, as Correa quickly and opportunistically swapped his early rhetoric of a “citizens’ revolution” for the banner of the “constituent revolution” (Becker, 2011: 59–60, 108).

While social movements continued to press for a new constitution after Correa’s election, however, the experience of 1998 had already proven that what mattered more was the content of the resulting document and the constituent process that generated it. As early as February of 2007, CONAIE and dozens of other social movement organizations marched to demand that Correa follow through on his promise to convoke a constituent assembly, insisting that he bypass the existing Congress if necessary—a performance that was repeated in October with the stakes raised to demand the immediate closure of the Congress (Becker, 2011: 128, 136). ⁷ While Spronk (2008) argues that Correa’s decision to cut the Gordian knot of oligarchic power from above by dissolving the Congress and granting full legislative authority to the Constituent Assembly showed a “strategic” decisiveness lacking in his Bolivian counterpart, she neglects the fact that Correa himself appears to have done so at least partly as a result of radical pressure and indeed tangible threats from below.

This constituent pressure, moreover, did not let up once the Constituent Assembly had convened and the Congress was dissolved, as CONAIE brought some 20,000 to the streets forcing Correa to take seriously their demand for a new constitution (Becker, 2011: 138–139). This pressure was only partially successful, however, and when Kichwa was voted down as an official language (under orders from Correa), indigenous delegates walked out of the Constituent Assembly (a weaker mention of Kichwa was later reinserted) (Becker, 2011: 147). Given Correa’s demonstrable hostility to indigenous movements, their successful inclusion of several demands (such as the denomination of Ecuador as a “plurinational” state and collective rights for ethnic groups) stands as a testament to their organized strength. Alongside and even prior to the drafting of the new constitution, however, Correa’s clashes with indigenous movements continued unabated, especially when the extraction of natural resources was in question.

Despite the constitutional enshrinement of sumak kawsay (living well) as a humane, reciprocal, and sustainable form of development, many felt that Correa’s emphasis on large-scale extraction stood in direct contradiction to this constitutional guarantee, and when struggles broke out he did not hesitate to turn to repression. “After Correa was elected,” Spronk (2008) writes, “he announced that he was investing more powers in the police and the military to repress popular protests. In April 2007 he followed through with that promise, sending in the troops to violently put down a protest against the mining activities of Toronto-based Iamgold.” In late 2007, indigenous groups seized oil wells in Yasuní National Park, only to have the president deride them as “infantile” and charge them under controversial terrorism laws, and when CONAIE and others critiqued the January 2009 mining law and threatened to oppose Correa in the upcoming elections he called them “criminals and subversive terrorists” (Becker, 2011: 177, 181).

By the time presidential elections came back around in 2009, Correa had so thoroughly burned his bridges with social movements that Pachakutik chose to endorse no one, and a CONAIE resolution summarized its stinging assessment of this “revolutionary” leader in the following terms: “Correa’s government was born from the right, governs with the right, and will continue to do so until the end of its time in office” (Becker, 2011: 183). While I do not share the determinism of this view, there is good reason to agree that the constitutional process in Ecuador “came at the cost of marginalizing social movements,” that “Correa had stolen the thunder from Indigenous militants,” and that he “held those to his left hostage” (127, 159). This desire to mobilize the masses for electoral purposes while undermining the power of movements in the streets echoes an important distinction between traditional and radical populism and further undermines Castañeda’s bad-left thesis by placing Correa closer to Bachelet and Lula than he would like to admit (Collier and Collier, 2002).

But if it is true that Correa, like Lucio Gutiérrez before him, “counted on the masses to lay down their arms,” this strategy of disarming popular movements was not without its consequences, as he would learn after his reelection (Becker, 2011: 202). As tensions rose over what the movements interpreted as an effort to privatize water, early 2010 saw a newly empowered and unified indigenous movement emerge despite Correa’s best efforts but as a result of his policies. And this was not all: amid public sector cuts in October 2010 that threatened police benefits, Correa was assailed with tear gas and temporarily held hostage by disgruntled officers, some of whom chanted the name of former President Lucio Gutiérrez. For a few hours at least, Ecuador seemed to be undergoing a reactionary coup, but arguably more important than the efforts of the coup plotters themselves was the chasm that this event revealed between Correa and the constituent masses whose protection he would need. During the crisis, the Pachakutik representative Cléver Jiménez called for Correa to be removed from power by the National Assembly, while CONAIE rejected both the coup plotters of the right and the government that claimed to be of the left (Ciccariello-Maher, 2010). While there is reason to worry that by rejecting both Correa and the coup plotters some movements were playing into the hands of the right, I am more concerned with how it was that Correa and the movements had reached such a deadlock in the first place.

To be clear: the progressive credentials of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa are unquestionable, and his policies are fundamentally incomparable to those of Gutiérrez. He defaulted on “illegitimate” foreign debt in late 2008, closed the U.S. Air Force base at Manta in 2009, and upped the pressure on domestic capitalism through expropriations. But, these macro-level policy changes aside, his relationship with constituent social movements has been worrying, and it is this relationship above all that will determine the radicalism of his government in the future. In his relations with the movements, Correa has repeated the discredited strategies and tactics of his predecessors: founding his own political organization and shunning existing movements, co-opting demands from below and watering them down from above, and frequently resorting to antagonistic name-calling. This repetition of errors, moreover, has led to a scenario much like that which confronted Gutiérrez: “After excelling at dividing Indigenous movements,” Becker observes, Correa’s policies eventually “facilitated their convergence” (2011: 187). While the verdict is still out as to whether Correa will govern for the people, he refused from day one to allow his to be a government by the constituent masses as expressed through social movements. But the lessons of constituent rebellion and the dangers of constituted power have not been lost on CONAIE and others, who have increasingly returned to the tactics of street mobilization and confrontation that demonstrated their strength in the first place.

Comparing Correa with Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2008, Spronk’s assessment seems almost a world away: Correa appears strategic and decisive, whereas Morales remains bogged down in a stalled constituent assembly. In the years since, most would agree that this assessment has been turned on its head, especially with regard to the relationship each government enjoys with social movements. While Correa steadily undermined his own left in an ill-conceived attempt to co-opt radical constituent energy, Morales was able until very recently to harness the movements more effectively against the backdrop of a weakened right. This has not meant that all has been smooth sailing, however: even in 2008, Spronk worried about the tendency toward a kind of “demobilization” of movements under Morales similar to what has played out under Correa, and sharp debates have recently broken out with regard to the status of the Bolivian revolution vis-à-vis its radical constituents. The stakes of these debates can be posed simply: Is the process under way under Evo Morales a revolutionary opening toward a possibly socialist future? Or is it instead a “reconstituted neoliberalism” (Webber, 2010)? This initial simplicity is misleading, however, and the perspective of constituent power and social movements requires that we ask not what Bolivia is but what dynamic has brought the process where it is today and what constellation of forces either threatens or favors its radical progression.

As in Ecuador, so too in Bolivia a chain of constituent irruptions generated the process that is now under way. Beginning most explosively with the Cochabamba water war of 2000 against a privatization scheme backed by the World Bank and Bechtel, constituent movements began a long counterattack against neoliberalism that would generate an ever-increasing capacity for coordinated street struggles. It was directly from these “victories forged in street mobilizations” that Evo Morales—in contrast to his Ecuadorean counterpart—emerged, creating a “political instrument,” the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS), that some have called a “social movement-party” (Dangl, 2007: 10; Harnecker and Fuentes, 2008; Spronk, 2008; see also Cameron, 2009: 334). As with Ecuador’s uprising, the water war set in motion what Jeffery Webber has termed a “left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle,” which “provided the basis for an escalating scale of radicalism” as “anticapitalist and indigenous liberationist demands of protesters broadened in scope, and the repertoires of struggle became more confrontational with time” (2011a: 147). As in Ecuador, this cycle spread across the country, first to Aymara indigenous struggles in the western altiplano and then into the cities with the 2003 antitax rebellions known as the impuestazo, which heavily prefigured the Ecuadorean forajido rebellion in their spontaneity, location, and class composition (Webber, 2011a: 162–181).

Eventually—and here again the parallels to Ecuador are striking—this cycle of struggle turned its attention toward the state in a dual motion, first negatively in the gas wars of El Alto by deposing a series of sitting presidents (Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and Carlos Mesa in 2005) and then positively by contributing decisively to Morales’s 2005 election. While many were rightly inspired by Morales’s 2005 electoral victory, however, Webber insists that events since have marked a shift “from rebellion to reform” (2010; 2011a: 319), one already visible in dynamics that emerged prior to the elections: “The MAS played a part in the mass mobilisations of May and June [which ousted Mesa], but ultimately acted as a dam, helping to prevent a potentially revolutionary flood from washing away the reigning power-structures of Bolivian society” (2011a: 259). Concretely, this meant an ambivalence toward nationalizing the natural gas industry, refusal to call for the Congress to be shut down (a constituent demand in Bolivia as in Ecuador), and an insistence on the need to win power via the existing institutional route (and presumably with the support of segments of the middle class).

Were this simply a temporary strategic ploy, however, there would be little ground for complaint, but according to Hylton (2011: 245), despite being elected against a weak and fractured right the Morales government “showed its reluctance to rely on direct action from below and its willingness to make backroom concessions, to the right.” According to Webber (2012), these “concessions” mark Bolivia’s neoliberal continuity, elements of which prominently include the maintenance of an export-oriented economy, the significant role of foreign capital (especially in hydrocarbons), limited agrarian reform, fiscal responsibility, and the protection of private property. Webber further interprets the recent controversy over the planned construction of a highway through the indigenous-controlled Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, which has exacerbated the already tense relationships between the Morales government and the social movements and prompted the collapse of the Pact of Unity as a further symptom of the neoliberal continuity of the Morales government.

Federico Fuentes disputes this argument that the radical energies of the recent insurrectionary cycle were effectively disarmed by the MAS once in power. “The Morales government,” he insists, responded to the shortcomings of previous insurrectionary moments by setting its sights on gaining power through elections and “represents a deepening, not a rupture, of the process that began in 2000.” Rightly drawing our attention to the complex and dynamic “interplay of factors” involved, Fuentes concludes that, rather than critique from afar, we must “defend the gains of the Bolivian process” by centering the anti-imperialist solidarity struggle (Fuentes and Webber, 2011). While both Webber and Fuentes bring minute details to the table, often interpreting them differently, I would like to draw attention to the broader strokes of the dynamic relationship between constituent and constituted powers and their interaction.

First, it is important to recognize that the process under way in Bolivia is just that: a process. To say, as Webber does in his rejoinder to Fuentes (Fuentes and Webber, 2011), that “fantasies aside, it’s reconstituted neoliberalism” (strengthening his prior claim that this was merely a “a tendency, not a law”) seems overly simplistic to me, because in Bolivia as in Venezuela and Ecuador, such complex processes and dynamic oppositions are not to be accurately captured in such static terms as either “socialism” or “reconstituted neoliberalism.” Seeing the Bolivian process in motion means that we must be careful not to read, for example, the 2008 massacre of 20 government supporters in Pando and subsequent failed coup attempts merely as symptoms or effects of Morales’s timidity (as I fear Webber and Hylton do) but also as causes in their own right: of the implosion of the right-wing alliance, the passage of the constitution, and an unprecedented institutional consolidation in the 2009 elections. ⁸ It would be difficult to foresee such an unfolding transformation from the static perspective of a “reconstituted neoliberalism.”

Viewing the Bolivian process in motion also means that we should be wary of assuming that statements from political leaders somehow reveal the hidden soul of the process, and in fact to do so is to subtly privilege constituted over constituent power. Thus I find Webber’s repeated insistence on the conservative and stageist positions expounded by Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera unconvincing (see Fuentes and Webber, 2011; Webber, 2010; 2011a; 2012). ⁹ When Venezuela’s Chávez was elected, for example, it was on a moderate “third way” platform that sought explicitly to attract the support of the Venezuelan middle class, and, like García Linera, he has explicitly defended private property on many occasions. It would be impossible, however, to explain the subsequent playing-out of the Venezuelan process on the basis of such positions.

The radicalization of the Venezuelan process has coincided with a shift in its class composition, and here Webber—perhaps without meaning to do so—gives us some reason for optimism about the Bolivian case. Largely as a result of his moderate rhetoric and program, Chávez was initially elected as a moderate with largely middle-class support, but subsequent political dynamics have catapulted both him and the process far beyond what might have been foreseeable from the snapshot of 1998 (see Wilpert, 2007: 268–269 nn. 19–20). Webber himself notes the degree to which much of the Bolivian middle class opted to throw its weight behind Carlos Mesa rather than Morales (2011a: 231). Thus while he rightly critiques Morales’s later efforts to court the middle class, the middle-class option has not been as clearly present for Morales as it has been for Correa in Ecuador, who has sought refuge there rather than in the movements.

Secondly, however, there remains the question of how we relate to such processes. While Fuentes emphasizes the international solidarity struggle through an anti-imperialist framework, Webber is openly critical of the course of the Bolivian process and insists that it is by supporting “the self-activity of the oppressed and exploited themselves” that we construct a “stronger anti-imperialism” (Fuentes and Webber, 2011). Viewing the Bolivian process as one comprising both state and movements, however, allows us to understand our role differently. Here, Hylton and Webber point the way, noting that Morales’s timidity during the early years of his government was not met with timidity by the forces of reaction, who attacked with unbridled and racist ferocity in 2008. Similarly, in Ecuador in 2010 Rafael Correa discovered that, against an onslaught of the right, he had squandered the support of his leftist base. And in 2002 Venezuela Chávez learned this lesson better than most when his organized revolutionary base returned him to power through mass mobilizations. Part of our task is to ensure that the lessons of these moments are learned to the fullest, which means neither placing ourselves outside the processes with our critiques nor withholding those critiques in favor of a purely anti-imperialist response. It is in the relation of constituent to constituted power that both concerns are most powerfully answered, since in the defense of these revolutions from within—the defense that matters most—support from the revolutionary constituent masses is the key to both the survival of these processes and their radicalization. ¹⁰

Focusing our attention on constituent power and social movements tugs apart even the ostensible unity of the so-called bad left. While the current governments of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela have all built on explosive constituent moments to drive forward constitutional processes aimed at transforming the structure of the state, Rafael Correa appears to have done so only as a result of pressure from the movements below and, moreover, as an ultimately failed and dangerous strategy to outflank those movements whose protection he would need. The case of Bolivian President Evo Morales remains more ambiguous, and it remains to be seen whether he will take the strategic lessons of recent years seriously. Central among these lessons is the fundamental need for mass support to both protect and drive forward the revolutionary process, and this lesson is not limited to the Bolivian conflicts of 2008 or the Ecuadorean coup attempt of 2010 but finds its best recent example in the case of Venezuela.

Walking the Fine Line: Venezuela

Castañeda reserves his sharpest rhetorical arrows for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who he insists “is driving his country into the ground” (2006: 40). ¹¹ Despite his efforts to undermine the good-left-versus-bad-left distinction, Cameron (2009: 334) gives too much ground to Castañeda by distinguishing too sharply between Evo Morales and Chávez: the former, for Cameron, came to power through mobilization from below, whereas the latter is unambiguously “populist” and divorced from social movements. ¹² While Chávez would seem to fit the populist bill perfectly—uniform and all—it is imperative that we not misunderstand his origins and his rise to power as a direct outgrowth of the constituent rebellion of Venezuelan revolutionary movements. It is precisely this sort of simplistic history that I have sought to complicate and rewrite from the perspective of the movements themselves (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013).

As early as 1958, Venezuelan “democracy” was confronted by a more radical and directly democratic version expressed in part through revolutionary movements. In the guerrilla struggle of the 1960s and the flourishing of underground social movements in the 1970s and 1980s we can see the development and consolidation of constituent power from below that was increasingly setting its sights on a corrupt, undemocratic, and later neoliberal two-party system. While Chávez and radicals within the armed forces began to conspire in the early 1980s, they were already in covert contact with these movements, and it would be the explosion of these movements into public life during the 1989 Caracazo rebellion that was the sine qua non for Chávez’s rise to power. In 1992 Chávez and his compatriots attempted to seize power directly, but the social movements provided the logistical and spiritual support for the coup, and Chávez insisted that it was a direct result of the Caracazo (Chávez and Harnecker, 2005: 32).

As a result of this long history, and despite Chávez’s concrete origin outside the social movements, the relationship between constituent power and the Bolivarian government has been much smoother and has seen fewer severe breaks than in either Ecuador or Bolivia. While some might attribute this difference to the prevalence of indigenous and resource struggles in the latter by contrast to a relatively settled approach to resource extraction, the opposite seems to be the case. One could argue that the relatively small indigenous population in Venezuela and high level of homogeneity reduced any tendency toward state-movement conflict, but here the militancy of the Chilean Mapuches serves as a powerful counterexample (Carruthers and Rodriguez, 2009). Alternatively, one could argue that indigenous movements were weaker in Venezuela than in Ecuador or Bolivia, but, while there is a degree of truth to this, the relative success of the indigenous movement in the Constituent Assembly would suggest otherwise (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013).

Finally, one might suggest that the predominance of oil led Venezuelans and social movements to accept the “magical state” and the oil economy that underpins it (Coronil, 1997). The few revolutionaries who have excluded themselves from the Bolivarian movement—anarchists and eco-communists alike—do tend to place some emphasis on the oil question. ¹³ The reality, however, is that the heterodox oil analyses that generated such critiques in the 1970s have themselves played a major role in shaping resource policy under Chávez and that the oil economy upholding the “magical state” is a double-edged sword that can contribute to the downfall of governments. ¹⁴ While struggles against specific aspects and forms of resource extraction continue to this day—especially around Lake Maracaibo—there is no doubt that both the government’s heterodox approach to oil and a relative consensus on the need to put oil revenues to social use have smoothed the path for Chávez’s relation to social movements. As things stand today, the overwhelming majority of organizers, revolutionaries, movements, and organizations recognize and support the Bolivarian government in more or less critical ways.

But none of this has meant smooth sailing for the Venezuelan president or that the constituent masses have voluntarily laid down their arms—literal and figurative—at the feet of a sitting president. Rather, the constituent masses and their organizations have maintained a ferocity on a par with that of their Ecuadorean and Bolivian counterparts that has forced the Venezuelan president to walk a fine line between constituent and constituted, movements and the state. While these movements are many and diverse, we can learn a great deal by closely tracking those at the very margins of the Bolivarian movement, those that would more frequently call themselves “revolutionaries” than “Chavistas” but that nevertheless recognize the importance of the president’s current role. These movements—ranging from the popular armed militias known loosely as Tupamaros to the militant wing of the peasant self-defense movement, those who have forced the hand of the government by occupying land and housing, the militant students, women, Afro-Venezuelans, and indigenous people—have thrown themselves into the struggle not against Chávez but against the state he inherited. As a graffito I once saw in El Valle put it, “Long Live Chávez, Not the Government!”

Widespread support for Chávez notwithstanding, the relationship between this sector and his government occasionally looks more like an armed standoff than a comradely discussion. Chávez regularly excoriates and ostracizes the most radical voices, those who push too hard, putting their disobedience on public display to please the middle class and the opposition, before quietly reincorporating them into the fold and often meeting their demands. In one notable case, he even demanded the arrest of the militant leader of the La Piedrita Collective, who had publicly threatened the life of an opposition media magnate, but that same leader explained to me that sometimes the president just has to say such things. This intricate dance by the president has allowed movements to push beyond the bounds of mere acceptability while he continues to play the electoral game.

As suggested above, the reversed coup against Chávez in 2002 constituted a fundamental turning point in the Bolivarian process, one whose lessons are multiple and must be heeded not only by Chávez but by Morales and Correa as well. When Chávez was overthrown by the Venezuelan opposition with U.S. backing, what became absolutely clear was the dependence of his constituted power on the constituent masses, and it was only those masses’ pouring into the street and the interventions of their more organized elements that ensured his return to power. At least for a while, Chávez took the lesson of the moment, and the Bolivarian Revolution underwent a process of fundamental radicalization that has brought us to the present: from a “third way” government characterized by moderation to an openly socialist and anti-imperialist one that is beginning to experiment in all seriousness with direct democracy and noncapitalist relations, property, and production.

But if this intimate relationship between constituent and constituted power marks an undeniable advance, the tethering of power from below (what Dussel calls hyperpotentia) to the state from above (potestas) is not without its risks. ¹⁵ While the Bolivarian Revolution has sought to incorporate the rebellious energy of the constituent base into the functioning of constituted power—subjecting the state to the popular will from below in an arguably unprecedented manner—this relationship is not without its dangers. Recent years have seen the from-below development of both popular assemblies and their armed counterparts, popular militias, met with the from-above institutionalization of both the communal councils and the Bolivarian militias. While the transformation of existing structures marked by these new institutions should be welcomed and understood as an example of the ultimate replacement of the capitalist state, we cannot neglect their tendency to sap constituent strength, demobilize the people, and rob the process of its driving force in the very process of attempting to shore it up.

Conclusion

As other contributors to this issue make clear, the binary offered by Jorge Castañeda, which distinguishes between a “good” and a “bad” Latin American left, is less than insufficient: it is internally contradictory and positively misleading. Considered from the perspective of the constituent power of the revolutionary masses and their social movements, the constituent moments that mark their explosive intervention in history, and the constitutional processes that they set in motion, Castañeda’s distinction disintegrates, but only after suggesting to us that there might be more good to the bad and more bad to the good. The inherent tensions between movements and the state are most evident among governments in which the constituent plays a more unmediated and revolutionary role, and leaders must come to realize that their best defense lies in the organized rebelliousness of the popular masses. If not, their fate may share more with that of France’s Robespierre and Haiti’s Toussaint, who according to James (1963: 286) destroyed their left-wing base and thereby sealed their own doom. Seeking refuge in the movements, moreover, bears a double promise: safeguarding the revolutionary processes and providing the best guarantee that they will quicken, radicalize, and deepen.

Ultimately, however, as in so many other discussions, the nation-state falls short as a unit of analysis, and we must think as well in terms of the continental dialectic set in motion by the two lefts in conjunction with one another. The good opens space for the bad, providing it a moderate alibi, whereas the bad provides the good with inspiration by destroying the myth of impossibility. But this relationship remains an uncomfortably tense one, especially for the so-called good left, which finds its own constituent base increasingly demanding, impatient, and optimistic.