Bolivian Critical Marxism: An Approach to the Work of René Zavaleta Mercado and Álvaro García Linera

René Zavaleta Mercado: National Classes and Motley Social Formations

To understand Zavaleta Mercado’s concept of national classes, we must first understand the context of his 1956–1969 texts, which are linked to a political-ideological strategy rooted in Bolivian revolutionary nationalism. That strategy attempted to alter the national historical consciousness, changing the interpretation of relevant historical facts and processes to give due value to the presence of the popular sectors (peasants, indigenous people, and workers of various kinds) and introducing a positive and constituent policy of the national-popular (Tapia, 2009). The revolutionary nationalist project had least three pillars: (1) an exercise in historical revisionism that sought to dismantle the colonial history underpinned by accounts of great national heroes and call attention to the role of national forces; (2) the development of a critical discourse regarding the Bolivian oligarchy, which was associated with antinational classes and a racist and nonsovereign project; and (3) recognition of the role of national classes across Bolivian history.

Zavaleta Mercado’s historical revisionism can be found in passages of his historical essays in which he argued that one of the constituent moments of Bolivian history was the conquest of Potosí—the emergence of the feeling associated with the colonization and Christianization of the territory (Zavaleta, 1967: 128). The Spanish conquest was conceived as a rupture with regard to the historical course of the social body of the Central Andes. Another topic relevant to this historical review was that of the Chaco War (1932–1935), a juncture analyzed as a foundation of Bolivia’s national consciousness. Virtually all of Zavaleta Mercado’s historical essays refer to the Chaco War, which clearly revealed how the interests of the oligarchy articulated with those of imperialism (the dominant elite supported Shell and Standard Oil’s interests in the struggle for the control of hydrocarbons). The oligarchy explained the defeat in the war in terms of the thesis of the guilty country or the sick nation and a deeply racist discourse. Conversely, Zavaleta Mercado argued that the Chaco War made progress toward the organic identification of the national classes (peasants, workers, and the middle classes [Zavaleta, 1967; 1977]). Yet another topic was the 1952 revolution, which allowed workers, indigenous people, and the masses to achieve power. Zavaleta Mercado (1967; 1977) interpreted the revolution as nationalization of political power that allowed for the gradual destruction of the oligarchy’s army, land reform, the building of union organizations in urban and rural areas, universal suffrage, education reform, the strengthening of civil social power, and the nationalization of the primary wealth of the country.

The revolutionary project’s radical critique of the oligarchy depicted the national classes and the antinational classes as antagonistic social forces and associated the oligarchy with the foreign elements that rejected national sovereignty, promoted privatization, and looted the country. The antinational classes (landholders, oligarchs, mining capitalists, ranchers, fraudsters, and gamonales, ¹ among others) were seen as responsible for limiting and opposing the nation. The oligarchy was accused of turning into a parasitic social class that lived off monocultures and looting, its wealth being based on the mita and pongueaje, ² the expropriation of indigenous land, and the ownership of estates. They were charged with producing and reproducing semicolonial conditions in the country, promoting a primary economic model and dependence, until the first half of the twentieth century, primarily on mining (of silver and tin by the mining companies of the oligarchs Patiño, Aramayo, and Hochschild [Zavaleta, 1959; 1963; 1967]). In its turn, the oligarchy characterized itself as white, rejecting and despising those it called cholos and indios, and developed a racist and colonial conception of Bolivian society, brutally promoting racial purification via the extermination of indigenous groups and the encouragement of European immigration. Additionally, it would always be denounced for its ties to British and U.S. imperialism, making it an elite that was alien to Bolivian society (Zavaleta, 2008).

The third aspect of the revolutionary project was the repositioning and recognition of national classes, especially the working class (mostly consisting of miners), the peasants, and some fractions of the middle class. For Zavaleta Mercado, the national classes were those confronting the social forces that promoted a semicolonial project for Bolivia and thus associated with a national liberation project while opposing the mining and landowning oligarchy and imperialism (Tapia, 2016). Indigenous rebellions such as that of Túpac Katari, the Chaco War, and the 1952 revolution were interpreted as milestones in which the national classes resisted colonialism or the nation’s semicolonial status and confronted the oligarchy. Revolutionary nationalism deployed a confrontational discourse directed at imperialism and the oligarchy, consistently portraying them as forces that rejecting the nation and promoting looting and dispossession (Zavaleta, 1963; 1964). The national classes were, in turn, portrayed as possessing emancipatory potential (Tapia, 2016: 69).

In addition to national classes, the Bolivian Marxists of the 1970s developed the idea of motley societies, in which diverse historical temporalities, worldviews, and forms of political organization, disarticulated and superposed, coexisted with a variety of modes of production. In motley societies unity was always formal, only apparent, and incomplete, characterized by a lack of articulation and organic coherence (Rodríguez, 1998; Tapia, 2009; Antezana, 2009; Souza, 2013). Zavaleta Mercado argued that in motley social formations such as Bolivia’s this condition was expressed in the coexistence of Andean forms of communal production and agriculture with forms of capitalist production associated with the colonial undermining of the peasantry, labor alienation, forced introduction of wages, and relations of production based on legally free men and women (Zavaleta, 1973; 2008). From this it can be argued that motley social formations involve failed or formal but not real subsumption of capital and appropriation of surplus. Real subsumption achieves the complete commitment of subjects and communities to capital, with transformation of the processes of production and social reproduction and the belief system and the elimination of community life and self-government. It makes possible the construction of hegemony and a historical bloc by establishing links between economic structures and the production of forms of government and all aspects of social life.

Zavaleta Mercado and the Specificity of the State in Latin America

The texts in which Zavaleta Mercado delved theoretically into the state from a Marxist point of view were written between 1971 and 1980. From exile in Chile and Mexico he argued with general theories and addressed the problematic of the state from a historical perspective. He developed the notion of the apparent state, highlighting its inorganic character—its inability to unify and articulate social complexity while synthesizing a structure that contains social contradictions and attempts to convert the interests of the ruling class into general ones. This and the notion of the state as class domination rejected the idea of the state as a reflection or result of the infrastructure. This approach to the state entered into dialogues and discussions with Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, Claus Offe, and John Holloway (Tapia, 2016).

In an essay entitled “El Estado en América Latina,” Zavaleta Mercado argued with the structuralist and instrumentalist visions of the state that tried to build a universe of closed categories that were distinct and counterfactual. His reflections engaged with the most influential theorists of the Marxist state of the time (Louis Althusser, Poulantzas, and Miliband). From Zavaleta Mercado’s perspective, the structuralists argued that it did not matter who held state power because the central issue was understanding power as an objective relationship that reflected the impositions of the ruling class and the subjection of the subaltern sectors. Rather than being merely the result of social conflict, the state condensed or crystallized it. Zavaleta Mercado’s concern regarding structuralist readings was that they ascribed a stable, fixed, almost immutable character to hegemony. With Gramsci, he argued that domination was never stable and that thinking about complete victories was absurd. For him, power structures could never be distanced from historical processes.

Continuing his debate with the structuralists, particularly Poulantzas, Zavaleta Mercado acknowledged, citing Lenin, that the state was a synthesis of society but said that this did not mean that it was a reflection of society. If it were, it would be an objective process or a product. He also debated Althusser’s notion of the ideological apparatuses of the state. There were indeed specific cases in which unions, parties, universities, or schools functioned as co-opted institutions, loyal to and immersed in the logic of the state, and they could be seen as arms of the state and their leaders as state officials. However, it would be wrong to categorize them as ideological apparatuses of the state, since they had also acted, in the specific case of Latin America, as antistate areas, platforms for counterhegemony.

Finally, Zavaleta Mercado (1983: 175) argued that, in addition to being a class apparatus or bloc, it was only at the point of origin that the state could acquire instrumentalist features. While he recognized the instrumentality of the state during the periods associated with original accumulation, he thought that it was nuanced. Addressing Miliband, he acknowledged that the instrumentality of the state could not be understood as a literal occupation of the ruling class but considered it more appropriate to refer to situations of instrumentality than to an instrumental view of the state. In other words, the dominant class can use the state as an instrument for its own goals without being there. This emphasis can be found in specific historical processes.

Zavaleta Mercado’s theoretical debates regarding the state are relevant to his view of the specificity of the state in Latin America. For him the state problem had at least three components: (1) the establishment of specific national states in motley societies, (2) the configuration of primordial forms or particular social equations in the relationship between state and civil society, and (3) the occurrence of constitutive moments or organic crises. The motley societies of Latin America, having tried and failed to subsume all their human groups under a single colonial and capitalist pattern, contained cultures that had been neither fully integrated nor entirely dissolved. Apparent states had been shaped and, unaware of the organizational systems of the indigenous communities, had attempted to impose an official culture and language while rejecting local forms of authority and the exercise of collective deliberation. In this way, nationless, skeleton states had been formed, and in Gramscian terms we could say that they had domination without hegemony. Zavaleta Mercado argued that the construction of national states in Latin America meant the dismantling of previous forms of political organization (more or less communal in nature) in an attempt at the forced unification of all the communities and peoples disarticulated through capitalist transformation. Motley social formations maintained many forms of political organization that coexisted with the national state and central power in order to survive. Luis Tapia (2013: 106) has pointed out that one of the weaknesses of national states in motley societies is the persistence of various forms of self-government. Thus, the political forms assumed by civil society in the motley societies of some Latin American countries are sometimes communal assemblies rather than states. These approaches, on the one hand, point to the importance of the forms of political organization of indigenous communities, signaling counterhegemonic ways of conceiving democracy, participation, collective deliberation, and self-government, while on the other they raise questions about the plurinationality of our societies and its political consequences in legal, institutional, and constitutional terms.

The complex relationship with civil society specific to Latin American states was, for Zavaleta Mercado, rooted in a “primordial form” or “social equation”—concepts that engage with the Gramscian concept of the “historical bloc,” referring to the degree to which society exists within the state and vice versa and to the ways in which the state and civil society are distanced from one another (Zavaleta, 1983: 177). The primordial form is dynamic. The state and society are invaded, receive each other, and interpret each other. The social equation contains elements of both historicity and chance; it is not predetermined. This means that the specificity of the state is a product of social forces containing particularities culled from its historical development (Zavaleta, 1983: 180); hence the analytic, conceptual, theoretical, and political relevance of examining concrete local, national history—the material specificity of every Latin American state.

The constitutive moment of Latin American states, according to Zavaleta Mercado (1983: 180), is the situation in which things are just as they are presented to be. This category is associated with the Gramscian notion of an organic crisis and the Marxian notion of original accumulation. As explained by Tapia (2009: 21), it is the moment when a social situation takes on the shape that it will have for the indeterminate future. In motley social formations such as Bolivia, the constitutive moment is relevant for understanding social complexity in that it reveals the heterogeneity of reality, thus enabling the expansion of social knowledge. In fact, many writers argue that, for Zavaleta Mercado, constitutive moments or organic crises served as tools for acquiring knowledge while revealing the complexity of social reality. Employing this concept, we can argue that national formation processes refer to different constituent moments. The undermining of the peasantry, the original separation of communities from their means of production, the assignment of legal freedom to human beings detached from their lands, the destruction of villages and communities, etc., are all processes that have been experienced in different ways in Latin America.

García Linera and the Commoner Bloc: Community, Social Movements, and the Subject

To understand the concept of the commoner bloc, we must first understand the role of the subject in the work of García Linera. This is relevant insofar as the conjugation of social and political sectors in one body is part of a larger exploration of who is responsible for channeling political/social change in Bolivia. While few writers have addressed this theoretical configuration, Dominique Temple (2010) and Sylvia de Alarcón (2010) have systematically studied its development. In an analysis of García Linera’s Forma valor y forma comunidad (2015b), Temple adopts an anthropological perspective and questions the “empire of categories” as it rules over the real cultural relationships in which communal reciprocity takes place. De Alarcón, in contrast, engages in a detailed analysis of two moments of García Linera’s career and observes a kind of tactical/strategic confusion of the concepts of an incomplete communal socialism and an imperfect state socialism.

To address the influences informing this unique concept of community, we must go back to the late Marx (Torres and Ortega, 2017). During the last stage of his life, Marx was concerned with the situation in Russia, and García Linera’s first translations (in the sense of Benjamin, 1996) of this work are the foundation for his understanding of complex concepts such as the nation, communal forms, and noncapitalist modes of production, concepts that would become the source of an emancipatory process. The starting point for García Linera was nonlinear historical development—the coexistence of modes of production and historical temporalities located in the same present space-time, the moment of motley social formations. Here García Linera went against orthodox interpretations of Marxism and saw in the community a raw potential capable of subverting capitalist social relations, since, in his view, community-produced social relations were antagonistic (organizationally and politically) to capital. As he put it, the communal was a locus capable of developing a singular form of communism that would allow a historical leap into concreteness (García Linera, 1989: xx). The community, then, represented the potential for the transformation of the world, as did national classes in Zavaleta Mercado’s work. That potential lay in the difference between ownership and possession that García Linera observed in Marx’s late reflections. In his “Introducción al Cuaderno Kovalevsky” he pointed out that community relations had to be understood not as a reified image of the indio—that is, as a folk image ravaged by the forms taken by value—but as alternatives to capitalist alienation (García Linera, 1989: xiv). The community, in turn, was not abstract. While ownership and modes of production made it an important aspect of the struggle for emancipation, García Linera did not see it as the only social subject capable of generating transformation. For this reason, his late-twentieth-century research led him to conclude that, although we face the “death of the condition of laborer” (García Linera, 2009b), the exploited would not become less important in society. Rather, their objective conditions would change under neoliberalism, leading to productive fragmentation, low union affiliation, etc. Thus the history of the struggle of the Bolivian people had not a single subject but a multiplicity of subjects.

Bruno Bosteels (2013) has pointed out that this theoretical expansion around an exclusive actor capable of transforming Bolivian reality is not random but a way of addressing class situations, social movements, and communal struggles. This is why García Linera assigned wider and more flexible characteristics to the classic Marxist revolutionary subject (Bosteels, 2013: 85). This expansion was not a departure from Marxism but, rather, a conclusion derived from the reading of a very specific Bolivian situation following the water war, during which indigenous, youth, territorial, and feminist groups (among others) took over the classic role of the union as the chosen locus for political action by the subaltern classes, thus opening the way for a plurality of actors. Following this, García Linera adopted the notion of historicity employed by Zavaleta Mercado for analyzing social formations.

This diversity of actors generated conflicting relationships at the same time that it provided the opportunity for a common project. In the essay entitled “El Estado en transición” García Linera (2009d) suggested that there were five moments that arose at every juncture of a state crisis such as those that took place in Bolivia from 2000 to 2006: (1) the unveiling of the crisis (i.e., a crack in the dominant political and symbolic system); (2) the catastrophic tie between an emerging bloc and the institutional one; (3) the replacement of the old institutionalized power with an emerging one; (4) construction, conversion, or conflicting restitution, the intense moment of a direct struggle when state-related projects seek to assemble the program presented by the mobilized social body; and (5), finally, the fork point, where a political event enables a transition to either a conservative restoration or the programmatic consolidation of the new power. These five moments allow us to appreciate the importance of the formation of a historical bloc in Gramsci’s sense. For Gramsci, “position warfare” in societies with a dense civil society was crucial, and it was impossible to take power if hegemonic forms could not be built from the ground up within the subaltern classes. This Gramscian notion resonated with the idea of the subject and the five moments of state crisis outlined by García Linera, who was concerned about the need to build a counterhegemonic force and saw it as a condition for transformation.

For García Linera, the most concrete materialization of the commoner bloc was the importance acquired by Bolivian social movements in national life and in the pluralization of actions and emerging political opportunities. In his reflections on Bolivian collective action, he proposed that there were different forms of social movements (García Linera, 2009c; Torres and Luzio, 2017)—unions, communal forms made up of indigenous groups, multitudes (of which territorial organizations were the most obvious embodiment), and crowds (expressions of frustration among the subaltern sectors). The concept of the multitude was García Linera’s appropriation of Zavaleta Mercado. It emerged from a broader understanding of social classes in which their various components rather than a relationship to the ownership of the means of production define them (Zavaleta, 2009). If we consider the theory of “the death of the condition of laborer”—that is, the disaggregation of workers across different productive centers—and add to it the cultural and national barriers typical of communal formations and the mononational character of institutions, we can see the multiple situations affecting the lives of subalterns drawn together by a center that imposed first colonialism and then neoliberalism. This means that the state is merely mimicry of real power in which the commodification of living conditions has displaced the rationale of public utility (García Linera, 2009c: 379).

These approaches to the subject and to the transformations brought about by neoliberalism show that Bolivia can only be considered a motley society. His conception of the commoner bloc shows that García Linera was not interested in suprahistorical formulas for transformation but rather, adopting historicity as a method, sought ways of enhancing the power of subaltern forces by identifying the types of alliances and forms of expressiveness they had acquired over time. In this sense, we may speak of a commoner bloc in that the great variety of social movements points to a multiform subject seeking to assume responsibility for representing the motley society. The commoner subject emerges through a shared experience of domination.

García Linera’s Reflections on the State: Contradictions, State Affirmation, and Disputed Narratives

García Linera’s reflections go through different stages. The first and most critical belongs to the period of his militancy with the Túpac Katari guerrilla army and the second to his interaction with the intellectuals of the Comuna group. It is at these two points of his career that we can perceive a growing interest in the issue of state power. Although a certain “statist” drift (Aguiar, 2013) was apparent in García Linera’s work, he did not always address the state with the same intense criticism and conceived it as a point of support for the emancipatory struggles of the oppressed (Torres, 2018a). Starting in the 1990s, for example, he noted that the struggles of indigenous peoples had to tend toward a “state affirmation” (García Linera, 1991)—an axis around which to universalize their actions and demands. In other words, state affirmation implies a nonnegative approach to the state and indeed is the centerpiece of emancipatory struggles. This reading has been criticized by his former colleagues of the Comuna group (Luis Tapia and Raúl Prada, among others), who point to a sort of theoretical rupture between his previous autonomist views and more state-centered ones after his joining the MAS. His concern with the state is ratified by the concept of state affirmation, which he developed during the time of his guerrilla militancy—the idea that the state could not be exclusively understood as an apparatus but represented a dispute over its own direction. Bolivia was torn between the “colonial narrative” and the “communal narrative” (García Linera, 2009a), struggling to attain a character and sediment certain kinds of institutions in order to crystallize a certain correlation of forces.

In the book Las condiciones de la revolución socialista en Bolivia: A propósito de obreros, Aymaras y Lenin (García Linera, 1988), the Leninist influence makes statehood an apparatus of class domination. This notion is expanded following writers such as Bourdieu, Weber, Elias, Gramsci, and above all Poulantzas—a twist that makes the roles of symbolic domination, the correlation of forces, and the institutional commodification exercised by the state in the daily life of people more complex (García Linera, 2009d; 2010b; 2015a).

This dispute between narratives has an impact on the symbolic-discursive production of societies, leading to particular institutional forms as an objectivation of the correlations of power that struggle to universalize their ways of life. The state, then, presents itself as a cluster of contradictions, “creative tensions” (García Linera, 2011). This paradoxical situation represents not only the struggle between the colonial and the communal but, as Svampa and Stefanoni (2007) have put it, between long- (the dispute against colonial domination), medium- (the processes of national liberation), and short-term (the antineoliberal struggle) memories. The most obvious contradictions within the state are between social community and illusory community, monopolization and universalization, ruling classes and governed classes, etc. (Torres, 2018b). The first is central; as García Linera (2015a) wrote, the state should be a kind of community (territorial, linguistic, educational, historical, mental, spiritual, or economic), but it can only be one if its apparatus is taken over and monopolized. Therefore, disputes surrounding the management of a common place can be initially developed by the state, but a contradiction emerges in that it is impossible to make the power of the state communal while it remains a state.

The recognition of the state as a locus of transformations requires specification, especially in the case of indigenous majorities. This entails formally recognizing the motley nature of Bolivian society and is one of the problems addressed by García Linera (2005), who exemplifies it with a multinational society and a mononational state. This tension is expressed in the exclusion of indigenous majorities from decision making, which universalizes, from within the state, the interests of ruling classes that do not acknowledge the plural character of Andean society. In this sense, it is possible to view the Bolivian bourgeoisie as one of Zavaleta Mercado’s antinational classes, since its interests lie not in the national milieu but in international markets. The formation of the commoner bloc must house the national multiplicity of cultural visions. Only in this way can the roles assigned to it by García Linera be understood.

In turn, the possibility that this multiplicity should consider the state a way of promoting emancipation requires two complementary elements: a shift from an apparent state (i.e., one lacking sovereign presence over the entire territorial body, especially in sectors where colonial domination persists openly) to an integral one capable of fully encompassing Bolivia’s social geography (García Linera, 2010a). In addition, state affirmation takes theoretical shape in that liberal democracy may coexist with communal democracy (García Linera, 2006), and the latter may succeed in subverting the rationale of the former and directing an emancipatory process toward a unique form of socialism, communal socialism (García Linera, 2010b). This may even encompass the state if it becomes a “universal ayllu” (García Linera, 2015b).

When we point to creative tensions or open contradictions within the state, this is not merely conceptual (monopolization-universalization, matter-idea) but entails popular struggles as a singular form of institutional crystallization. In State, Power, Socialism (1979), Poulantzas says that the state must be understood not as an instrument but as the material condensation of correlations of forces. For García Linera, the state became such only via the ruling classes’ monopolization and ability to make the rest of society accept that its management of national goods favored the entire population (García Linera, 2015a: 149). The problem of the state, in short, was threefold. First, because it was a condensation of correlations of forces, struggles over it gave it a certain character regarding its role in society. Secondly, it was a central structural dispute between the colonial narrative and the communal narrative. If the state is a social community and an illusory community, then we can extract from this a third alternative that enhances the common practices of the subaltern sectors with a view toward universalizing them. The third contradiction follows from this: state power is a monopoly while simultaneously allowing for a universal response to it. Thus we come to the fundamental question that has yet to be answered. Is it possible to communalize the power of the state?

Conclusions

García Linera and Zavaleta Mercado represent what Aricó (1986) termed heretical Marxism, a current that questioned the Soviet canons for revolutionary perspectives. It was with concepts such as the motley society, national classes, the community and the commoner bloc that they developed an original Marxism in tension with general revolutionary theories and orthodox Eurocentric formulations in a political and intellectual exercise aimed at not only understanding but also transforming the concrete historical reality of the Andes and Latin America. These concepts can be understood as one of the most encouraging intellectual exercises since Mariátegui, part of a historical and theoretical search for anticapitalist references in Latin America with the goal of influencing political processes that aimed to overcome capitalist exploitation. Specifically, however, there is an obvious relationship between the two in their questioning of the centrality of the working class to the revolutionary process.

Our two writers undertook historical revisionism, delving into the history of colonial, class, and cultural oppression of the subaltern sectors to identify feasible projects. Zavaleta Mercado’s concept of the motley social formation was taken up by García Linera to make its historical continuity feasible, employing it to describe forms of exploitation and domination in the neoliberal era. Thus the ideas of the commoner bloc and the different types of social movements account for the way social groups organize themselves under current modes of production and problematize the economic, cultural, and political bases of colonialism and capitalism. Both suggest that, under the conditions of the motley society, the state, while an important center of political power, is not the only one. Therefore, the commitment to maintaining communal and representative democracy simultaneously is not a contradiction, provided that the subaltern sectors’ view of power allows for historical and social continuity.

Another shared topic is these writers’ concept of the state. Both García Linera and Zavaleta Mercado saw it as an area of dispute, with contradictions and conflicts that were mutable and contingent on the power relations developed by disputing social actors rather than on a monolithic institution. In this sense, both were critical of instrumentalist and structuralist positions and adopted a stance closer to Gramsci and the late Poulantzas (a questioning of Althusser’s influence). By analyzing the colonial and apparent character of the state, they posited characteristics that could apply to all of Latin America and, from this continental perspective, expand global understandings of the state.

Similarly, Zavaleta Mercado’s national classes can be understood as multiidentity formations and a precedent for García Linera’s commoner bloc, especially where it pertains to the multitude form adopted by social movements. In turn, antinational classes are proof of the materialization and perpetuation of the apparent state. For García Linera, however, the task was to make that state “comprehensive”, while for Zavaleta Mercado this was not necessarily the case, especially given the idea of democracy as the self-determination of the masses.

This difference takes us back to the question whether the state can be communalized. García Linera considered this both desirable and possible. Zavaleta Mercado was not so clear, given that motley social formations represented different historical temporalities in which communal representation itself did not necessarily produce a unity of diversity. However, this does not mean that García Linera posited the homogenization of Andean society; rather, he sought forms of communal democracy in order to overcome the power of the state.