Evo Morales, transformismo, and the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in Bolivia

Journal of Agrarian Change, 2014

There is a widespread understanding in critical scholarly literature that the government of Evo Morales is fundamentally challenging the neoliberal order in Bolivia. The empirical record of Morales’ first five years in office, however, illustrates significant neoliberal continuities in the country’s political economy. At the same time, the most important social movements that resisted neoliberalism prior to Morales’ election have been considerably demobilized in its wake. This gives rise to the critique that the Morales government as merely implemented a more politically stable version of the model of accumulation it inherited. This paper draws on recent field research in Bolivia to make a contribution to this broader research agenda on reconstituted neoliberalism. Our focus is twofold. On the one hand, the paper examines the continuities of agrarian class relations from the INRA law at the height of neoliberalism in 1996 to the various agrarian reform initiatives introduced since Morales assumed office in 2006. On the other hand, the paper traces the mobilization of the Bolivian Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST) in response to the failure of the 1996 neoliberal agrarian reform, followed by the movement’s demobilization after Morales’ 2006 agrarian reform initiative. The paper explores this demobilization in the context of agrarian relations that have remained largely unchanged in the same period. Finally, the paper draws on recent reflections by MST members who, to varying degrees, seem to be growing critical of Morales’ failure to fundamentally alter rural class relations, and the difficulties of remobilizing their movement at the present time.

While the government of Evo Morales rules in the name of indigenous workers and peasants, in fact the country’s political economy has since 2006 witnessed the on-going subjugation of these classes. If the logic of large capital persists, it is legitimated in and through petty indigenous capitalists. This article argues that Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of passive revolution offers a superior analytical point of departure for understanding contemporary Bolivian politics than does Álvaro García Linera’s more widely accepted theory of creative tensions. However, the dominant manner in which passive revolution has been employed in contemporary Latin American debates has treated the socio-political and the ideological as relatively autonomous from the process of capital accumulation. What is necessary, instead, is a sharper appreciation of the base/superstructure metaphor as expressing a dialectical unity of internal relations between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, thus avoiding one determinism or another. Through a reading of Gramsci that emphasises such unity, this article interrogates the dynamics of ‘extractive distribution’, class contradictions of the ‘plural economy’, and transformations in the urban labour market which have characterised Bolivia’s passive revolution under Evo Morales between 2006 and 2015.

Journal of Latin American …, 2012

The Bolivian revolution of 1952 was a turning point in the country's history. The revolutionary upheaval in the countryside resulted in one of the most drastic agrarian reforms in Latin America. Together with the Cuba revolution of 1959 it signalled an era of land reforms throughout most of Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Almost half a century had elapsed since the Mexican revolution of 1910-17, in which the peasantry were major protagonists, before they were able again to overturn the traditional landlord system but this time in Bolivia. However, Bolivia's agrarian reform of 1953 generated highly contradictory processes whose consequences have assumed dramatic proportions today threatening the national integrity of the country. Despite Bolivia's long history of agrarian reform the land question is at the centre of the contemporary political debate like in no other Latin American country, especially since the early 1990s when the land issue became enmeshed with the ethnic and indigenous question. This essay explores the various forces unleashed by the agrarian reform, some paradoxical and conflicting, which have subsequently led to a so-called 'second agrarian reform'. It also seeks to explain the reasons for the persistent rural poverty and the renewed relevance of the land question in Bolivia. The essay closes with a summary and some reflections on the whole process started by the 1952 revolution as well as making a few recommendations for a development strategy which is capable of dealing with the land and poverty problems.

Antipode, 2014

This article engages with the politics of class struggle and state formation in modern Bolivia. It examines how current forms of political contestation are shaped by the legacy of the Revolution of 1952 and the subsequent path of development. In so doing, we therefore explore spaces of uneven and combined development in relation to ongoing transformations in Bolivia linked to emergent class strategies of passive revolution, meaning processes of historical development marked by the overall exclusion of subaltern classes. With this in mind we argue that state formation in Bolivia can be read as part of the history of passive revolution in Latin America within the spatial conditions of uneven and combined development shaping the geopolitics of the region. However, the expansion of passive revolution as a mode of historical development has been and continues to be rigorously contested by subaltern forces creating further spaces of class struggle. 1 Departments are administrative/political subdivisions within which the country is divided into. 2 The history of capitalist modernity expressed through conditions of uneven and combined

Fields of Revolution, 2021

In Chapter Four, we look closely at the charged debates that followed the 1952 national revolution on agrarian reform. By tracing local petitions, intellectual proposals, and political party debates, I portray the challenges of running an expanded program of land reform that would expropriate hundreds of rural private properties. I also show the crucial role of Latin American intellectuals, especially those from Guatemala and Mexico, in nurturing Bolivian debates. Once the government enacted the law, I track the two most iconic cases of land distribution in Ucureña and Achacachi, both of which demonstrate the key role of peasant lead- ers in radicalizing the process from the start and from below.

Bolivian Studies Journal, 2013

Abstract On 18th December 2012, Evo Morales celebrated his seventh anniversary as president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. In 2005, this Aymara coca growers’ union leader was elected for the first time, with the support of social movements and, in particular, of the peasant and indigenous sectors, inaugurating a moment of political transition that raised many expectations for an in-depth transformation of the state-civil societal relationship. A complex reshaping that, as the popular belief suggests, was going to pass through a highly delicate moment: the seventh year. Relying upon an in-depth empirical research on social and land conflicts in Bolivia, this work aims to analyze the revitalization of new corporative struggles among collective rural actors (indigenous vs. peasant) in light of the recent institutional and normative reforms. The latter have favored a reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and social sectors, inaugurating a new phase of fragmentation and conflict. Resumen El 18 diciembre de 2012, Evo Morales celebró su séptimo aniversario como presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia. Este líder cocalero aymara fue elegido en 2005 con el apoyo de los principales movimientos sociales, inaugurando un momento de transición política que generó muchas expectativas por una profunda transformación de la relación entre Estado y sociedad civil. Una relación evidentemente compleja que, como lo sugiere la creencia popular, está por entrar en un momento muy delicado: el séptimo año. A partir de un estudio empírico de los conflictos sociales y por la tierra en Bolivia, este trabajo da cuenta de la revitalización de nuevas luchas corporativas entre actores colectivos rurales (indígenas vs. campesinos) a la luz de las recientes reformas institucionales y normativas. Estas últimas han favorecido un proceso de reconfiguración en la relación entre Estado y sectores sociales, abriendo paso a una fase de fragmentación y conflicto.

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2014

""Agrarian reforms do not constitute linear processes: rather, they are based on the interconnection between the crystallization of land governance in formal tenure rules and the way societies organize around a set of identities and power mechanisms. This paper focuses on how the misinterpretation of this two-way relationship, in setting up a new normative framework, can generate unintended consequences in terms of conflict. The recent wave of land conflicts in Bolivia shows how changes in the allocation of strategic resources inspired by the so-called ‘politics of recognition’ triggered processes of political ethnicization and organizational fragmentation, eventually contributing to fuelling new tensions between indigenous groups and peasant unions.""

Historical Materialism, 2008

Th is article presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year ( January 2006–January 2007) of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers at a general level the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. Part II of this three-part essay addresses four major themes. First, it reviews the literature on revolution in contemporary Bolivia. Second, it explains why the 2000 to 2005 period is best conceived as a revolutionary epoch in which left-indigenous social forces were engaged in a combined liberation struggle against racial oppression and class exploitation. However, it argues that this revolutionary epoch has not led to social revolution. Third it examines in detail the electoral rise of Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) party in the December 2005 elections. Fourth, it explores the historical trajectory of the MAS in terms of its hanging class composition, ideology, and political strategies since the party’s inception in the late 1990s.

Leigh Binford et al., eds., Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America (Berghahn Press), 167-193, 2020

The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged and theoretically imaginative responses to these important issues of late modernity.