On the Perils and Potentialities of Revolution

Structural Conflicts and Historical Patterns

In Bolivia, social conflict is rooted in a socioeconomic system characterized by acute structural inequalities and by a sociocultural pyramid that reflects racist and discriminatory paradigms inherited from colonialism.

In recent years, Bolivia has in many respects been an extreme case (ECLAC, 2010). Indeed, it is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America. The latest United Nations human-development report places Bolivia at the top of the list of Latin American countries in degree of inequality, and this in a region that is the most unequal in the world (UNDP, 2011: 25). The richest 10 percent of the population had incomes 79 times higher than the poorest 10 percent (UNDP Bolivia, 2010). These trends ended up generating tension between increasing political participation and symbolic inclusion and persistent socioeconomic inequalities (UNDP Bolivia, 2010: 66).

Geographical differences and tensions represent another structural element that acquired new intensity after Morales’s victory. During the first three years of his administration, national politics was characterized by the polarization of West versus East and by constant clashes and demonstrations against the government’s policies by important sectors of the population. The opposition was led by the conservative classes of the Media Luna (the eastern departments of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Tarija, Beni, and Pando) and was made up of regional movements with renewed and strengthened culturally based political identities (Centellas, 2010). Mobilizations were articulated around demands for departmental autonomy and were based on historical tensions, issues of uneven economic development, the historical opposition between the highlands and the lowlands, and the distribution of the most important natural resources, land and hydrocarbons (Weisbrot and Sandoval, 2008). In the framework of the conflict over autonomy, peaks of violence were registered in Cochabamba in January 2007 after the announcement of a referendum by the prefect (governor) and opposition leader Manfred Reyes Villa, which triggered riots between prefectural forces and MAS supporters that ended in two deaths. In November of the same year, tensions resulting from the debate within the Constitutional Assembly degenerated into violent struggles between pro-government and opposition groups that produced two more deaths and hundreds of injuries in Sucre. Finally, there was an escalation of conflict in September 2008 after the referendum to revoke Morales’s mandate reinstated him. In Santa Cruz, autonomists occupied central government buildings, and in the northern department of Pando on September 11, 16 peasant Morales supporters were killed by a group of armed civilians later identified as members of the autonomist prefectural forces (UNASUR, 2008). The achievement of a political agreement to resolve the crisis opened a new phase of social conflict.

Since 2009, with the promulgation of the new constitution and the defeat of the right-wing opposition led by civic committees in the eastern part of the country, the center of structural conflict has shifted. The executive has tended to reproduce the classic dynamic of socioeconomic conflict with a strong rentist and clientelist component. This dynamic is part of a wider framework in which the presence of vast natural resources has historically been the source of discord. Throughout Bolivian history, “the rent-seeking trap” (Laserna, 2006)—the perverse effect of an abundance of natural resources on national development—has governed economic and political agendas and strengthened existing corporatist mechanisms. In an attempt to overcome problems of poverty and inequality, the state restructured control over natural resource rents but in the process reactivated the trap in a context of weak institutions, chronic inequalities, and high expectations for change. Although this mechanism transcends political conjunctures and geographic locations, it often tends to stimulate conflict. ⁴

Reflecting on the series of conflicts that destabilized the country in the middle of 2010 (the march of the indigenous groups of the lowlands to demand the incorporation of their proposal into the Framework Law of Autonomies, the civic strike in Potosí for the implementation of departmental autonomy, the protests against the new customs law organized by small traders’ organizations), an editorialist for Página 7 wrote (September 10, 2010, translation mine):

These protests follow the classic procedure, the one that was often used by President Morales in the past and that brought him much profit. The protagonists are leftist and impoverished social sectors that directly question the central power, looking for benefits from the income obtained from natural resources. These conflicts are part of the redistributive demands that emerged at the beginning of the century. The most interesting thing is that, probably for the first time, these demands are being expressed not through the official party but against it.

At the same time, the government is trapped not only by its political discourse of tolerance toward social movements but also by a rhetoric that emphasizes the availability of wealth, fiscal surplus, and foreign investment. In a context that typically follows a rentist logic, these statements tend to sound like an invitation to formulate demands. This old mechanism, rooted in the clientelistic system of relations of the colonial era (Rivera Cusicanqui, 1993: 109), has the perverse effect of immobilizing and weakening the government. Despite the new political trajectory toward income redistribution and the strengthening of social participation in politics, the Morales government during its first term benefited politically from a strategy of “symbolic compensation for exclusion” (Do Alto and Stefanoni, 2010: 5) that to a certain extent also took the form of concrete reforms. Beyond the redistributive measures financed through the nationalization of hydrocarbons—in particular the primary education and maternal and infant health care vouchers (Bono Juancito Pinto and Juana Azurduy) and the new universal pension fund Renta Dignidad—other important social policies have depended upon new forms of international cooperation among the members of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—ALBA) (Cuba and Venezuela, in particular), which contributed to the implementation of literacy, health, free identity-card issuance, and local territorial management programs. ⁵ However, neither the new symbolic balance nor the concrete reforms have reduced tensions, which in 2011 had three main sources: the increase in the cost of living and the scarcity of basic products, the insufficient increase in wages, and the control of land and natural resources (UNIR Bolivia, 2011).

The year 2010 ended with a generalized conflict between the state and wide sectors of the Bolivian society called the gasolinazo: the government decreed a 73 percent increase in the price of liquid fuel while reducing gas and diesel subsidies. The measure triggered a series of widespread social protests that eventually obliged the government to rescind it a few days later. The withdrawal of the measure was not, however, sufficient to contain the significant increase in inflation (from 4.5 to 7.2 percent), which was the source of a new wave of demonstrations in the following months, amplified by protests against the shortage of basic products such as sugar, vegetable oil, cocoa, and coffee. In April, after two decades of social marginalization, the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Labor Confederation—COB) assumed the leadership of a new wave of social protests, calling for a wage increase above the 5 percent proposed by the government. The most important mobilization, which received media attention at both the national and the international level and catalyzed the Bolivian political debate for several months, was the eighth march of the indigenous people of the East against the construction of a transcontinental highway in the Territorio Indígena Parque Isiboro Sécure (Indigenous Territory of the National Park Isiboro Sécure—TIPNIS). After a month-long mobilization, Morales forbade the construction of the highway through the indigenous territory. In the meantime, counterdemonstrations by sectors closer to the MAS (mainly peasants and coca growers) took place in support of the construction, and the conflict seems not to have reached a definitive conclusion. These episodes mainly demonstrate the increasing fragmentation of social sectors and the weakening of the role of the government in resolving social tensions. It is clear that the typical oppositional politics of Bolivian social movements have not changed even with a more progressive administration.

Functional Conflict and the Dynamics of Internal Control

The political institutional element is central to an understanding of the dynamic of functional (or structuring) conflict. ⁶ The structuring of conflict is a reflection of dominant narratives. Much of the tension in society and the tension arising from diversity in the dominant coalition are controlled through a self-reinforcing set of narratives about crucial aspects of social life, a strong, collectively accepted discursive system for interpreting critical issues. The MAS government has to confront political conflict at two levels: against the opposition and the old elites and within and between social movements. In the latest political phase, internal conflict appears to be more prevalent and complex.

The MAS is an articulation of subjects, organizations, and social movements in which no one faction plays a dominant role in the construction of new identities (Stefanoni, 2003: 66). As Kohl and Bresnahan (2010a: 19) write, “many of the challenges of the MAS agenda come from the hybrid nature of the party” (the combination of traditional partisan institutions and corporatist forms of organization and subjectivity). In fact, a new wave of identity and organizational construction, deconstruction, and hybridization has been generating conflict for the control of corporatist power and political space. In the 1980s, with the creation of the indigenous movements, the corporatist monopoly of the peasant union organization broke down, and rural sectors rearticulated around a new multipolar system with two key poles: the peasantry and the indigenous sector. The peasantry component is represented by the Confederación Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unified Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB), the Confederación de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia Bartolina Sisa (Bartolina Sisa Confederation of Women Peasant Workers of Bolivia—Bartolinas), the Confederación de las Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia (Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia—CSCIB), and the coca growers’ unions, while the indigenous component is represented by the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of the Qullasuyu—CONAMAQ) and the Confederación de los Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous People of Bolivia—CIDOB). On this basis, the political outreach of the MAS was established. The alliance known as the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact), which served as a mechanism of coordination and programmatic convergence of the main rural movements, included elements of risk and potential fractures that, only latent during Evo Morales’s first term, began to emerge with more clarity and power from 2009 on.

A complex system of alliances has been fashioned in which tensions arise especially at the local level. In this sense, the issue of land regulation and property is a major source of conflict among the MAS’s rural allies, involving different views of development, territorial organization, and power management. On the one side, indigenous organizations call for collective forms of land property (tierras comunitarias de origen [native communitarian lands]) and for respect for the right of consultation. On the other side, peasant unions defend a system of individual or communitarian property (assigned on a territorial rather than an ethnic basis) and consider the indigenous collective territories “new latifundios.” Moreover, these conflicts are fueled by strong ethno-cultural discourses that become the basis for the strengthening of new collective identities and trigger social fragmentation (Fontana, 2012).

Morales’s first administration managed to maintain a certain degree of control of endemic tensions within the social movements. Conflicts were not worked out through the institutional framework but symbolically and discursively manipulated so as to strengthen the MAS’s political project and its grassroots coalition. There was an effort to avoid the formation of counterhegemonic options from the far left and, at the same time, to channel tensions toward common strategic fights against enemies. For example, the pro-government leadership has accused some coalition members in critical positions of betraying the “process” and expelled them without debate, while personal attacks and harsh language have dominated the recent debate among intellectuals who were once part of the process (Almaraz, 2011; García Linera, 2011). At the same time, there was a clear strategy of distracting attention from the concrete causes of conflict with alternative political narratives based on external enemies and threats. Moving from the constructivist premise that narrative shifts are constitutive of social change and politically instrumental, I will focus on the two main discursive pillars of the MAS’s strategy for “structuring” social conflict: the directing of tensions outward through the identification of external enemies and the generation of new “merging categories” capable of reinventing, in inclusive terms, the constellation of fragmented identities within the MAS.

The Construction of the Enemy

The government’s strategy appears to follow the logic of Lewis Coser’s (1956) propositions on conflict: avoiding the explosion of latent intergroup tensions requires channeling them toward shared external threats. The maximum expression of this process is the definition and characterization (through real and imaginary—often mythological—elements) of the enemy (Bauman, 2005: 174). In this sense, the narrative dimension is paramount. The conflictive universe of the MAS government has made abundant references to three enemies deeply rooted in the collective memory of the postcolonial masses: the right and the business sector, as the incarnation of the parasitic conservative oligarchy; the United States and its satellites (the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID], the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA], and sometimes nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations) as the imperialist, neocolonial evil; and the Catholic Church in its conservative and totalizing expressions.

Since the defeat of the radical right in 2008, there have been no visible political rivals that could challenge the government’s strength. As Fernando Oviedo Obarrio (2010: 105) concludes, “Congressional opposition does not represent a sufficiently solid trend to become an immediate political alternative. Similarly, the opposition generated in the so-called Media Luna . . . has proven to be nothing more than an intersecting regionalism, far from signifying any danger for the political hegemony of the MAS and its leader.” For that reason, the role of the opposition needs to be reconfigured, at least in discourse. According to this line of thinking, although it is too weak to compete successfully on electoral and political fronts, the right is still the evil that furtively plots against the legitimate power, the vile and insidious enemy that attempts to subvert the hegemony of the leadership by corrupting the purity of its membership, the one that plays dirty and stabs its adversaries in the back. In this sense, its main weapon is infiltration. In practice, the micro-narrative, the leitmotif of the “infiltrated right” used in the president’s statements (Cambio, August 30, 2010; La Razón, May 7, 2010; La Razón, July 4, 2010), is absorbed in the discourse of the members of Morales’s government and social movement leaders, and through a chain reaction it becomes a collective narrative among its rank and file. The following statements reproduce this narrative archetype:

The right infiltrated social movements. The rightists are those who have . . . the capital. They get into other organizations to generate fights among us. Even within families, they can enter and make us fight among ourselves. The right does not know how to rearticulate itself. Rather than rearticulating, it is taking control of our organizations. (Isabel Ortega, Vice Ministry of Indigenous Peasant Justice, La Paz, July 29, 2010)

There are serious political actions undertaken by the right in opposition to original indigenous peasant autonomy. If you are not supporting one another to strengthen the processes in the face of the right . . . then the right will be there to rearticulate in local spaces. (Public official, Vice Ministry of Autonomies, July 15, 2010)

After the general and municipal elections [in 2009], there was a vacuum. As a result, some NGOs with an opposite vision started to infiltrate, and also the right. That is why nowadays there are conflicts. This is programmed. It started in Caranavi, ⁷ then it passed on to CONAMAQ, CIDOB, and now Potosí. ⁸ So, it is clear that this is planned, a plan to destabilize the process of change. . . . They even wanted to murder the brother President Evo Morales. But they know that it is difficult to destabilize the government, so instead they destabilize social movements, foment internal struggles, struggles among ourselves. . . . It seems to me that nowadays the right is infiltrating in order to regain political power. (Leonilda Zurita, former leader of the Bartolinas, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, August 20, 2010)

The weakness of the right ⁹ in all its varieties does not necessarily play out in favor of the ruling party, at least in terms of internal cohesion. Therefore the government needs other symbolically reliable enemies to manage tensions. The United States, for example, appears to be a very efficient enemy in the discursive plan: this narrative draws on a wide repertoire of resentments and historical rivalries, based on both facts and discursive and symbolic imaginaries that associate the North American power with evil. It is a narrative that is generally accepted as true because it has on its side historical memory, past and current evidence, and the inability of the “enemy” to change the imaginary that surrounds it by prioritizing “soft” over “hard” power (Nye, 2004). According to the government’s narrative, the U.S. embassy alternates with the CIA, the DEA, and the USAID, all of which use subtle, covert strategies. Indeed, the Bolivian government blamed U.S. infiltration for practically all of the relevant internal conflicts that occurred in 2010. In June 2008, the Coordinadora de las Seis Federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba (Coordination Committee of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba), an organization that includes the majority of local coca growers, expelled the USAID from the Chapare region with the support of President Morales; in September the U.S. ambassador was declared persona non grata, and two months later the activities of the DEA in the country were suspended. Moreover, the government accused the United States of spying and financing opposition groups, allegations partially confirmed by the WikiLeaks cables in 2010. In response, the funds assigned by the U.S. government for cooperation were drastically reduced (by 50 percent in the case of antinarcotics aid and 72 percent of the general development budget between 2011 and 2012). At the same time, Barack Obama decertified Bolivia’s drug control efforts, a measure that carried with it the exclusion of the country from trade preferences.

At the end of 2010, the MAS’s anger was directed against the Catholic Church. In November the government raised the possibility of the revocation of its economic and fiscal privileges and threatened to expropriate its property. This type of rhetorical confrontation tended to come to the fore not in reaction to a given concrete event but in contexts of relative political calm.

Although the focus of our analysis is the narrative strategy of Morales’s government for managing internal conflicts, the discursive construction of the enemy is not based on pure political imagination and strategic calculation. In fact, the relative weakness of the right comes from the failure of its effort to overturn the government in 2008. This marked an important breakthrough and opened a new political phase characterized by the discrediting of the right and the growth of tensions within the dominant coalition. In terms of destabilizing potential, however, the right still constitutes a risk, particularly if its actions are complemented by those of the social movements attacking the government from the left.

Merging Categories

The second rhetorical strategy of the MAS for dealing with internal conflict is the repetitive use of “merging categories,” inclusive narratives that reinvent new collective subjects and teleological notions. These narratives occupy a privileged place in the strategy for consolidating the MAS political order, which is intimately tied to a narrative of space and time (Lechner, 2002: 83). Two dominant narrative axes play a central role in political and especially populist discourse. One narrative is an economic one that reflects a vision of development. It is a history of the future, a type of social eschatology that points to the best way toward development. The other is a social narrative along the lines of what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls the “imagined community.” It is a history of the past that abundantly draws on mythology to redefine collective identities in the present. Changes in these key narratives, which are always in competition to explain and interpret the world, are likely to produce transformations in collective social and political dynamics.

The key merging category of Evismo’s teleology is “living well” or “the good life” (vivir bien). This new national economic model and epistemological paradigm rejects the linear concept of material progress and is centered on community development, assuming that social well-being should be based on the principles and values of equality, solidarity, reciprocity, and respect for differences. It is “a cultural expression of shared satisfaction of human needs that goes beyond the economic and material spheres to include affectivity, recognition, and social prestige” (Ministerio de Planificación al Desarrollo, 2010: 18). “Living well,” which comes from the Quechua principle suma qamaña, is a state of being that is based on a “relationship of equilibrium of people with society and nature” (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2010: 115). In this sense, it rejects the principles of most consolidated economic paradigms including capitalism and socialism and places the individual on the sidelines and community and nature at the center. Its epistemology is a mix of elements from the Andean and indigenous views of the world (Mother Earth, the communitarian dimension of social life), rejection of the economism inherent in the human-development paradigm, and support for the idea that well-being depends not only on the accumulation of material goods but on multiple social dimensions, freedoms, and capabilities (Sen, 1999). The concept of living well places a premium on identity: “If we do not defend our identity, we are going to die, to disappear” (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2010: 54). In the economic and social realm, new hierarchical universes are established: nature over human being, community over individual, identity over equality.

The paradigm is already part of the new constitution. According to Article 8, “The state assumes and promotes as ethical-moral principles of the plural society ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa (do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal), suma qamaña (living well), ñandereko (harmonious life), teko kavi (good life), ivi maraei (earth without evil), and qhapaj ñan (noble way of living).” The concept is also mentioned in Article 80, on education, and Article 306, on the state’s economic organization (“The Bolivian economic model is plural and is oriented toward improving the quality of life and the good life of each and every Bolivian”). Article 313 lists the ingredients of the recipe to achieve this economic Copernican revolution: (1) generation of the social product in the framework of respect for individual rights and the rights of the people and the nation; (2) appropriate production, distribution, and redistribution of wealth and of economic surplus; (3) the reduction of inequalities with regard to access to natural resources; (4) the reduction of regional inequalities; (5) the industrialized productive development of natural resources; and (6) the active participation of the public and the communitarian economies in the productive apparatus.

This discursive architecture, however, has been somewhat lacking in practical application. Indeed, the teleological paradigm is stronger in the description of “heaven” than in that of the “path to redemption.” The economic and development model implemented by the MAS government contains nothing revolutionary (Cunha Filho and Gonçalves, 2010), creating a rather orthodox nationalistic capitalism with strong neodevelopmentist traits (what Webber [2011] calls a “reconstituted neoliberalism”). This is not to say that there have been no relevant micro- and macroeconomic results in terms of poverty reduction, the national debt, increase in the gross domestic product, and the current-accounts surplus during the MAS administration. Rather, it is to point out that positive economic performances are rooted to a lesser degree in innovative economic strategies and models than the discourse suggests.

Moreover, there are significant divergences among the views of the living-well paradigm within the government itself and, in particular, between one faction closer to indigenous worldviews and communitarianism and another that represents the more pragmatic national-popular component and tries to associate appealing concepts with much more traditional development recipes that are rooted in the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Finally, the often idealized and romantic view of the communitarian economy and the good life generates tension with the daily and concrete demands of the people, who, in general, are not looking for economic asceticism and austerity but are attracted to Western capitalist lifestyles. Critical opinions highlighting the disjunction between discourse and reality also originate from social movements. A representative of the Bartolinas (interview, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, August 19, 2010), for example, says:

[Living well] is an issue of the past. . . . It is a sociological invention, a conceptual category. It’s like saying “people’s happiness,” “national liberation,” or “twenty-first-century socialism,” as Chávez says. Here we chose living well. Oh, how beautiful! It comes from below, the original indigenous . . . money money money . . . so, the indigenous say yes! Of course! Living well! But they can’t even talk about living well . . . because they do not live well. . . . Those who live well are the middle class, those who live thanks to international cooperation. So they keep being used.

In spite of its theoretical and practical weaknesses, however, at least in the epistemological domain, this paradigm shows that there is a logic alternative to the liberal and neoliberal paradigm and to its monolithic conception of the human being as homo economicus.

In the process of redesigning identities and constructing the MAS’s “imagined community,” the central issue is the concept of the indigena originario campesino (original indigenous peasant) as a major pillar of the national-popular project. This concept was created to define the rural sectors close to the MAS: the constellation of Eastern indigenous groups, the peasantry (with its colonizer and coca-grower sectors), and the highlands autochthonous population (mainly Aymara and Quechua). The final result is summarized in the constitution as follows: “An original indigenous peasant nation or people is each and every human collectivity that shares cultural identity, language, historical tradition, territorial institutions, and worldview and that existed prior to the Spanish colonial invasion” (Article 30). It is basically a discursive strategy for facilitating the incorporation of rural popular subjects into a unique national hegemonic project.

The MAS’s narrative reproduces in part the discourse of the 1952 revolution, which tried to integrate the popular masses into the revolutionary project (Mayorga, 1993: 126) through mestizaje. More than homogeneity, the effort now is to create discursive alliances among original indigenous peasant sectors. Rural Bolivia’s trinitarian structure (excluding the agricultural and stockbreeding elites) is traditionally ruled by a system of alliances and conflicts with a changing balance of forces. This conflictive pattern implies a weakness for the implementation of the MAS-promoted hegemonic project, for which anchoring to the rural base is fundamental. The negotiation, at least in discursive terms, of a category that includes and represents all the sectors gave a certain breadth to the project and served as a propulsive force for more radical reforms. It is in this merging category that the broader doctrinal and juridical changes, in particular the innovative definition of the state as plurinational, are rooted.

Final Remarks

Social conflict is a mirror of a country’s sociopolitical dynamics. It provides information on the axes of tensions, power relationships, institutional efficiency, discursive and theoretical innovations, and chronic and conjunctural problems and strengths. This brief analysis of contemporary social conflict in Bolivia supports some general reflections on the complexity and heterogeneity of the process of change and in particular on some of its main weaknesses and on the contributions of the Bolivian experience to the regional and global debate on democracy and development.

The MAS government is prisoner of a kind of political praxis and social culture that seems to resist democratic consolidation (Salman, 2007), and it has failed to change the rentist and developmentist economic paradigms and in some ways ended up strengthening them. Moreover, it has supported old patterns of collective action and mobilization instead of implementing innovative mechanisms and spaces of dialogue between the state and civil society. At the discursive level, the strategies for managing conflict, mainly within MAS-created political structures, that were successful during Morales’s first term now appear unable to sustain the rhythm of the transition, laying the coalition open to internal fragmentation and instability. There is, in other words, a lack of political capacity to regenerate the alliance in the new context and to identify structural and structuring elements capable of building unity out of diversity. In moments of crisis, particular sectorial interests tend to prevail and threaten the government’s equilibrium. Finally, there has not been a meaningful change in the power management logic, which remains centralized and offers limited institutional spaces for the direct participation of social actors in political affairs.

Despite the fragilities of the new political experience, its historical significance for Bolivia and for contemporary political analysis—in particular state and development theories—is unquestionable. It could be said that the process of change is a very powerful critique of globalization and the neoliberal values that were dominant at the end of the last century.

In Latin America, the neoliberal enlightenment often manifested itself as a universal, homogenizing force that dominated institutions and perceptions. Neoliberalism gained widespread acceptance in the 1990s in the form of key paradigms such as the monetarization of problems and the increasing autonomy of functional logics built upon universal models completely emancipated from historical roots, contextual differences, and subjectivities (Lechner, 2002: 52). The Bolivian experience demonstrates that neoliberalism and its practices could not succeed in the long run. A society is not only a material structure; it is also a body of subjectivities, a history, and a project. The MAS has the merit of introducing an innovative culturally rooted political perspective. ¹⁰ As Lechner (2002: 124) has put it, “To create a perspective is to create a story that positions the present with respect to the past and the future.” The Bolivian proposal brings to the surface subjectivities, experiences, and alternative memories of the past that were hidden by years of “naturalizing” hegemonic policies (through the neoliberal market logic, revolutionary socialism, or the official advocacy of mestizaje).

The MAS’s effort to build new collective narratives introduces a tension between an overwhelming past and new horizons. The Bolivian process thus highlights the limits of neoliberal and, in general, of monocultural paradigms. From the new political and cultural perspective, an organic view of society and respect for its various components are paramount.

In the 1990s, Latin America was dominated by a neoliberal pragmatism that turned out to be a political and social failure. In contrast, this century has again raised the banner of egalitarianism. To different degrees, progressive Latin American political currents are attempting to reduce the gap between strong and weak social sectors. This goal represents the ideological common denominator of progressives in power who are quite different among themselves. The banner of redistribution of wealth, in the words of one anti-MAS Bolivian journalist, is “an ambition as old as modernity that still persists despite the discrediting of some of its most important political expressions, such as primitive socialism and Marxism” (Molina, 2011).

The aspiration for equality as the driving force of revolutionary trajectories is constant in Bolivian history and was one of the major impulses of class and ethnic struggles. The MAS, however, grounded this banner not in the Marxist tradition, which was highly influential in the twentieth century, but in an idealized equality of the traditional community as opposed to the individualist, greedy spirit of modern man. The teleology of living well highlights a social dimension that works according to different logics and has anticapitalistic and antieconomist features. It is an effort to conceptualize the drive for equality, direct democracy, and cultural diversity as alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Likewise, the paradigm of the plurinational state, with the original indigenous peasant as a corollary, shows the strength of the combination of the communitarian-based revolutionary propulsion of society and the construction of a coherent national-popular state with common perspectives and identities. ¹¹

Bolivian communitarianism is a counterparadigm with respect to liberal democracy and development models. It is a critique of the argument whereby communitarianism gives way to modernization and its capitalist incarnation. In this sense, its main value is to show the limits of the neoliberal paradigm that considers the human being as homo economicus. Perhaps the most important contribution of the recent Bolivian political experience to the global debate is the definition of a novel utopian political horizon on which the new imagined borders place the old teleologies in doubt and challenge the complexities of modern society. Indeed, in the face of contemporary challenges, it is important to recognize the positive role of utopias as spaces for exploring new potentialities and illuminating pioneering paths.