Abstract
This book, part of the Brill Historical Materialism Series, provides an empirically rich and theoretically grounded account of left–indigenous liberation struggles in modern Bolivia. For such an endeavour, Webber employs insights from ethnography, historical sociology and Marxism, and restates the possibilities for a new historical-materialist understanding of working-class and social-movement politics in the 21st century.
The volume critiques some of the assumptions of post-modernism in the studies of new social movements – or more explicitly, the ‘prevailing liberal-institutionalist understanding’, which often portrays contemporary indigenous social movements in Latin America as a politicisation of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’, a quest for ‘multiculturalism’, and so on (p. 300). In order to understand the political present of Bolivia, Webber instead develops a historical-materialist analysis centered on social class, political economy and history, and is nonetheless receptive to other non-class identities and processes.
After prolonged dictatorships and authoritarianism, electoral democracy was established in Bolivia in 1982. The neoliberal-multicultural model introduced by the Gonzalo Lozada government emphasised reforms in the Constitution, and declared Bolivia, ‘multiethnic and pluricultural’, with the ‘recognition of certain linguistic and traditional rights by the state’ (p. 138). This was done without touching the socio-economic structures and prevailing racial divisions in the country, and Bolivia further witnessed the inauguration of the neoliberal order through deregulation, the weakening of labour and the selling of indigenous community-owned resources to private companies and multinational corporations.
Against this background, the election of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, in December 2005, was a turning point in the history of the country. The left–indigenous struggle in Bolivia was primarily against the exploitation and oppression of the working class and indigenous majority, as well as being grounded in opposition to the privatisation of water, gas, oil and other natural resources. Eventually, the cycles of insurrectionary struggles (largely Water Wars and Gas Wars) culminated in the overthrowing of two neoliberal presidents: first Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in October 2003; and then Carlos Mesa Gisbert in June 2005.
This is precisely the central concern of Webber’s work, which tries to ponder the question of what made this momentous transformation possible in a society that is otherwise so highly polarised by class and race divisions, and by imperialist oppressions. He argues that political change in Bolivia did not emerge from nowhere, but rather that it represented the maturation of long incomplete left–indigenous liberationist struggles, which he narrates using rich empirical data and theoretical insight.
What is so remarkable in this ethnographic description of a political insurrection is that the work tries to locate the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ conditions behind such eruptions, and develop an inter-sectional approach towards race and class struggles without departing into any kind of reductionism. Webber’s deployment of certain categories and concepts (mostly borrowed and developed) to understand the complex dialectic of the left–indigenous struggles is highly ingenious and productive. Webber goes on to argue, ‘a specific combination of elaborate infrastructures of class-struggle and social movement unionism, historical traditions of indigenous and working class radicalism, combined-oppositional consciousness, and fierce but insufficient state-repression, explain the depth, breadth, and radical character of recent left-indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia’ (p. 2). This kind of analysis is possible as a result of the non-reductionist historical materialist approach adopted, and due to an eagerness to accept class and consciousness as historical processes.
Webber explains the coming together of left–indigenous activists through the idea of ‘combined-oppositional consciousnesses’. The coming together of class- struggle and indigenous liberation during the Gas Wars and Water Wars nurtured a combined-oppositional consciousness. This has been visible in their critique of imperialism, racism, and opposition to the privatisation of natural resources like water, gas and mines; as well as in other various insurrectionary struggles in the rural and urban areas. Class and race solidarity became visible through the notion of vecinos (‘neighbours’), and the use of the word ‘vecino’ by indigenous activists often valorised ‘the mixed character of racial and class consciousness’ (p. 261).
However, it also gave ample space for the expression of indigenous identities in diverse ways. In many insurrectionary struggles, Aymara peasants waved brightly-coloured wiphala flags; women wore their traditional pollera skirts; the neighbourhood committees that sprung up mirrored the ayllus (communitarian organisations); and they shouted slogans for communal democracy and against capitalist democracy in their native language.
Apart from this, the ‘infrastructure of class struggle’ also played a large part in the culmination of left–indigenous triumph. The infrastructure of class-struggle – that is, social movement unionism and trade union organisations – in El Alto and La Paz gave concrete political expression and consolidation to their movements. By ‘infrastructure of class struggle’, Webber means ‘all those formal and informal networks – in the work place, community, household, land and territory – that orient, organise, politicise, and mobilise the class-struggles of the largely indigenous proletarian and peasant-majority’ (p. 20, emphasis original). The coming together of social movements and militant trade union movements helped to reach out to other unions and neighbourhood-based organisations, and they worked in tandem with the informal proletariat and the formal working class. This played a decisive role in the coming together of peasants from the Andean plateau, displaced mine workers, and social movements, thereby forming a oalition of the oppressed during the Gas Wars in El Alto and in the Water Wars in Cochabamba.
And moreover, during this phase, the ‘freedom dreams’ of left–indigenous activists envisioned a society based on social equality and dignity. As Webber observes, ‘the principal protagonists of the Gas-Wars envisioned a better society along four principal lines: (i) equality, the end of poverty, and the abolition of social classes; (ii) a future free of racism; (iii) dignity, social justice and basic necessities; and (iv) socialist and indigenous-liberationist democracy’(p. 262).
Bolivia had rich popular cultures of resistance and opposition, rooted in indigenous–liberationist traditions and Marxism. Webber traces the unmistakable importance of this ‘cultural reservoir for understanding injustice’. The struggles and memory of indigenous resistance and heroism against Spanish colonialism, led by Tomas Katari, Tupaj Katari, Bartolina Sisa and Zarate Willka, were subsequently reinterpreted by the organic contemporary intellectuals. Trsitan Marof (Gustavo Navarro) was one of the founders of Trotskyite Marxism, and an organiser of Bolivia’s mining workers movement, advocating slogans such as ‘land to the Indians’, and ‘mines to the state’. For Webber, these resources in popular culture are equally important for ‘revolutionary and non-revolutionary movements’.
In short, Red October is a passionate critique of the recent ‘cultural turn’ in studies on social movements, and of ‘depictions of indigenous movements in Bolivia as principally non-class, ethnic phenomena’ (p. 304). His is a scholarly attempt to situate left–indigenous struggles in Latin America in an appropriate perspective. The book also problematises the dominant scholarship that tends to delink ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality from history and political economy, with Webber’s analysis of left–indigenous struggles clearly showing the ‘interpenetration of race and class’ in the context of Bolivia. The study is the result of close examination of movements and people through in-depth interviews and field work, supplemented by extensive archival and rich historical research alongside historical generalisation, which gives additional appeal to this remarkable volume. The work will be invigorating to all scholars and readers who take interest in the dynamics and of strategies of indigenous politics and class struggles in Latin America in the 21st century.