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Patrick Dove
Abstract This essay looks at the history of the Bolivian Left in the light of a
repeated desencuentro a pattern of misunderstanding and missed opportunities between conceptual categories proper to Marxism and indigenism.
This structure of missed encounters can be traced at least as far back as the late
eighteenth century, when Andean indigenous insurrections against Spanish colonial power preceded criollo (of European descent) independence by a mere few
decades. It also figures prominently in twentieth century Bolivian history,
when Marxian-inspired national popular movements tended to subjugate racial
and ethnic categories beneath the concept of class. In the recent uprisings
against the neoliberal state of privatisation, meanwhile, indigeneity emerges as
an important political signifier at a time when Marxism appears to be incapable
lvaro Garca Linera is one
of contesting the power of global capital. The work of A
attempt to engage with this history of missed encounters between Marxism and
indigenism.
In his 2005 essay Indianism and Marxism: The Missed Encounter Between
lvaro Garca Linera, a long-time political activist,
Revolutionary Logics, A
public intellectual and (at the time of this writing) Vice President of Bolivia,
examines a history of misunderstanding and missed opportunities that have
prevented class-oriented revolutionary projects and ethnically-focused decolonisation projects in Bolivia from joining forces against an oligarchic order
founded on racially-coded logics of exclusion, domination and exploitation.
As conceptual categories, ethnicity and class have all too frequently been
treated by contestatory movements as if they belonged to separate and irreducible worlds or, even worse, as if they were the two poles of an opposition in
which one term was synonymous with truth while the other was equivalent
with false consciousness or bad faith. This is a problem that has divided the
Bolivian Left for most of the past century or more, and it illustrates why
efforts to apply Marxist theory to Latin America in a way that subjugates
ethnic and racialised elements of colonial experience to a general economic
rationale are bound to fail.
Patrick Dove
The purpose of this essay is two-fold. In the first part, I provide an overview of Garca Lineras discussion of the factors that have split the Bolivian
Left since the beginning of the twentieth century. I also propose that the historical narrative of desencuentros could and should be extended further back
than the time period he examines. In the second part, I explore an alternative
theoretical approach to the desencuentro topos, one which supplements the
temporal framework of Garca Lineras discussion desencuentro is literally
a non-encounter with a spatial frame. For this I turn to the Bolivian
Marxist thinker Rene Zavaleta Mercado, who developed a concept of abigarramiento [a heterogeneous or disorderly arrangement of things: colors on a
sweater or flag, or races and ethnicities] in order to think about social and
ethnic heterogeneity in Bolivia. It is only when we bring Zavaleta and his
spatial metaphorics into the picture that we begin to see how the problem of
desencuentro is not limited to the Left or the twentieth century but is in fact
coterminous in Bolivia with modernity and its ways of understanding historical time. Finally, Garca Linera understands desencuentro as an unfortunate
consequence of the shortsighted academicism that has afflicted Latin
American receptions of Marxist political thought, but which could in principle
be avoided or corrected given the proper measure of good faith and respect
for the other. By contrast, this essay proposes a view of desencuentro as a
structuring law of untimeliness and dis-jointure that may indeed define all historical experience or, if one prefers, any event as always already different
from itself.
The Spanish term desencuentro has a greater reach and resonance than any
of its possible English translations. Literally a non-encounter, desencuentro is
commonly translated as misunderstanding, discrepancy, disagreement,
falling out or missed appointment. In Garca Lineras text, the term refers
first and foremost to the stubborn incomprehension that has historically prevented the Marxist Left in Bolivia (but it is not just Bolivia) from finding
common ground with indigenous communities and movements. Because
Garca Linera views Marxism and indigenism as potential allies, this failure
of understanding also constitutes a missed opportunity or a falling out, a
series of emancipatory possibilities that repeatedly culminate in the disappointment of mutual incomprehension and mistrust. While the term desencuentro does not appear in the body of Garca Lineras discussion, the
structure of the essay shows that at least three of these possible meanings
are in play: misunderstanding or conceptual impasse; disagreement in the
sense that Jacques Rancie`re gives to the term: a conflict within a community
over what constitutes meaningful speech and what counts as belonging
(Rancie`re 2004); and missed opportunity.
Let us now look at the epistemological and ideological underpinnings of
this historical desencuentro of the Bolivian Left with itself. The cycle appears to
begin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the first emergence of radical labor movements in Bolivia. These urban-centered projects
were grounded in intellectual traditions borrowed from European contexts,
and they almost reflexively accepted the idea that the only possible subject
of emancipatory or revolutionary action was the working class. Although
Garca Lineras essay title employs the short-hand marxismo to describe
these proletariat-centered perspectives, the same teleological template is
present in a range of ideological perspectives: anarcho-syndicalism (late nineteenth and early twentieth century); Marxism (first appearing in the 1920s but
only making serious inroads in the 1940s following the disastrous Chaco War
of 19321935) and finally the national-popular revolution of 19521953, which
brought to a close a long history of oligarchic rule while establishing the social
and political legitimacy of a new popular subject defined in working-class
terms. The national-popular revolution differs from the other ideological tendencies discussed by Garca Linera on several important counts: it is a nationalist project that accepts the legitimacy of the republican state as guarantor of
rights and equality; it reaffirms the capitalist system while envisioning a regulatory state that could ameliorate its contradictions and it demonstrates a will
to power which, as in much of Latin America prior to the 1960s, was largely
absent from Marxist discourse in Bolivia.
Ideological differences notwithstanding, these urban working-class discourses inherited the same developmentalist view of capitalist industrialisation and proletariat struggle as the only viable historical course for social
transformation. In so doing, however, they actually reinforce the semblance
of necessity or inevitability that accompanies capitalist forms of social organisation. By the same token, these radical projects tended reflexively to equate
indigeneity the conceptual category of ethnicity as well as the practices, outlooks and discourses of actual indigenous communities with a delayed form
of awareness whose backwardness offered little more than an obstacle to historical consciousness, progress and emancipation. The indio, from that perspective, was either a potential worker in need of political education or a
forgettable remainder of Bolivias colonial legacy who would forever prove
refractory to revolutionary interpellation.
Indianism and Marxism is first and foremost a self-critique of the historical reception of Marxs thought in Bolivia, of a tendency which Garca Linera
describes as primitive Marxism (Garca Linera 2009b: 478ff) and, even more
derisively, as marxismo de catedra (roughly speaking, academic Marxism, a
haughty Marxism that remains immersed in the realm of abstraction and cut
off from the real world) (Garca Linera 2009b: 479).1 While he dates the first
reception of Marxist thought in Bolivia to the 1920s, it does not truly begin
to flourish until the 1930s and 1940s in the wake of the disastrous national
experience of the Chaco War. As is the case in many other Latin American contexts, the dominant reception of Marx in twentieth century Bolivia was predicated on a very literal reading of the limited range of Marxs writings that had
been translated into Spanish. The available archive in Spanish was limited for
the most part to texts dealing with English, French and German historical contexts. As Garca Linera points out elsewhere in La potencia plebeya, it did not
include any of Marxs or Engelss later reflections on how the epicenter of
revolutionary activity had shifted away from Western Europe or, for that
matter, how emancipatory praxis might need to be rethought and recalibrated
in other latitudes where social composition demographics and relations of
production does not achieve the relative degree of homogeneity found in
Patrick Dove
Patrick Dove
See, for example, Jeffrey Webbers account of how the Morales administration
has adopted neoliberal austerity measures while also prioritizing the fostering of
foreign and transnational investment in extractivism over the concerns of Bolivias
peasant and indigenous sectors in Webber 2012.
4
In an interview with Pablo Stefanoni, Garca Linera is asked about persistent criticism from indigenous groups. In his response he characterizes dissident groups as
being behind the times, and in his recourse to this metaphor of temporal delay he
silently invites the question of just how far the Bolivian left has advanced in its thinking since the time of its academic Marxism: it seems likely that some social organizations are still somewhat behind the times in terms of their historical situatedness.
They are still resisting against the State and its hard for them to put themselves in
this new time of occupying power structures (Stefanoni 2006: n.p.).
5
I am of course alluding here to Rancie`res notion of the distribution of the sensible (Rancie`re 2004).
For examples of the racial denigration of indigenous-led popular social movements see Webber 2011, especially Chapter 5.
Patrick Dove
As Garca Linera describes it, the post-1953 period was defined by the de-ethnicization of campesino discourse and thought, in favor of imagined inclusion in a cohesive mestizo cultural project of the State, together with the conversion of nascent
campesino unions into a base of support for the nationalist State in its mass democratic
phase (1952 1964) as well as its dictatorial phase (1964 1974) (Garca Linera 2009b:
484).
See Webber 2012 for a forceful account of how the MAS state does not do away
with neoliberalism in Bolivia. In Webbers view, neoliberalism continues more or less
10
Patrick Dove
unabated in Bolivia today, albeit under a different name, in the form of austerity policies, the aligning of national development with the interests of global capital and the
opening of the national economy to global markets and, moreover, the recodification of
this opening to global capital as a pre-political decision that cannot be opened up to
public debate.
11
The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category:
that of the latifundistas or large landowners. It is a much broader social system, represented not only by the gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries,
agents, parasites, etc. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns
into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hegemony of the semi-feudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government
(Mariategui 2007: 26, note 1).
12
Patrick Dove
philosophy of history that is inherited from Hegel, i.e., based on the supposition that every time is defined by its own characteristic mode(s) of production,
and that there is a logical sequence to be followed in moving from lower to
higher stages in world history. Antezana understands this alternative conceptualisation as seeking to accomplish what Trotskys uneven and combined
development sought and failed to bring about: a break with, or at the very
least a hiatus within, the Hegelian narrative of development. The limitations
of uneven and combined development are exposed through its inability to
avoid reproducing the very teleological structure of evenness that it purports
to call into question.
We can gain a more detailed perspective on how the sociedad/formacion
conceptual juxtaposition works in Zavaletas late thought by turning to one
of the key historical scenes explored in Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia: the War
of the Pacific (18791883) that was waged between Chile and a Bolivia
Peru alliance, in which Chile triumphed decisively despite significant demographic and economic advantages held by its opponents. Following its disastrous defeat, Bolivia was forced to cede to Chile the mineral-rich region of
Antofagasta, which also happened to be the Andean countrys only access
to the ocean. Zavaleta explains the Chilean victory and Bolivian defeat
through an analysis of the different colonial experiences that informed each
countrys post-independence trajectory. Peru and Bolivia were dominated by
the gamonalist system, which divided land into parcels or fiefdoms and
maintained indigenous populations as indentured servants or slaves. This
system did not foster any of the institutions and practices through which a
principle of commonality or equality was established in many nineteenth
century contexts: no free labor markets, no universal education, no universal
suffrage, no biopolitical determination of society as a population that could
be counted and statistically administered. Nineteenth-century Bolivian elites
made no effort to assimilate the majority indigenous populations into a
common social and cultural milieu. Social organisation therefore remained
profoundly hierarchical with exclusion, subjugation and naked exploitation
justified through images and narratives of the Indians racial inferiority. In
Chile, by contrast, Zavaleta asserts that a fundamental assumption of equality
did emerge and establish itself as part of the dominant social logic at least
among the majority criollo population during the colonial era. He attributes
the principial emergence of equality to the historical experience of the Arauco
War, which the Spanish colonial order waged against the Mapuche during
more than four centuries of colonisation. It was on the basis of this Indian
war that all Spaniards and criollos in Chile came to see themselves as equals
regardless of social station: equals because soldiers of the Crown in a just
war waged against infidels and barbarians (Eim 2010). The contrast between
distinct colonial experiences gives rise to different modernities. It is on the
basis of this same colonial war, which continued to simmer well into the nineteenth century, that the independent Chilean Republic was able to include a
principle of equality among the white or mestizo Spanish-speaking majority
(Zavaleta 1986). The stark contrast between Chile and BoliviaPeru illustrates
the difference between a group that is united by the idea of a national space
an idea for which one is willing to risk ones life and another group that
has no reason to consider thinking of space as national because their
13
10
On the totalisation of time see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and
the Avant Garde (Osborne 1995). To illustrate this idea of temporal totalisation, Osborne
refers to Heideggers meditations on being toward death in Being and Time. For Heidegger, death is not synonymous with the end of biological life; rather, it names both
14
Patrick Dove
the possibility of anticipating such an end (a possibility which, for Heidegger, is proper
to the human and which therefore designates not just a biological end but also the end
of all human endeavors, desires, awareness and so on) and the impossibility of ever
relating directly to death qua event. Death, in other words, is the constitutive limit
of human Dasein for Heidegger. It is this notion of the constitutive limit that I am interested in bringing forth in the discussion of abigarramiento and desencuentro.
15
desencuentro would seem to be capable of functioning as an essence or an identity. They are names for misfits and incongruous mixtures that precisely
unravel the stable and seamless, or apparently smooth, determinations
required by both social ontology and hegemony theory. Each term points to
a difference that traverses Bolivian society, splitting it even before it could
have conceived of or imagined itself as a single, unified entity. It might be
that abigarramiento names something of that order which Alberto Moreiras
calls the infrapolitical: an underside to political thought that theoretical practice cannot do without, but which is also irreducible to political ontology and
which predictably gets effaced whenever it enters into the conceptual vocabulary of this ontology.11
By way of a conclusion, I develop a little further the still-germinal idea
that Zavaletas analysis of abigarramiento as the irreducible and non-negatable
heterogeneity of Bolivian modernity can be drawn into dialogue with the
desencuentro theme. If abigarramiento is a spatial metaphor for thinking about
heterogeneity and the internal difference of totality without falling into a normative, unidirectional developmental understanding of historical time, desencuentro might provide a temporal metaphor for thinking through the
disjunctive simultaneity of what are ordinarily assumed to be distinct historical temporalities in Bolivia. I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive demonstration of this link here, which would require a much more sustained
engagement with Zavaletas text. Garca Lineras account of the desencuentros
between Marxism and indigenism in Bolivia is clearly indebted to Zavaletas
thought, in the sense that this Marxism with the rare exception of thinkers
such as Zavaleta has consistently avoided its responsibility (which is also
to say, its opportunity) to engage precisely with the social reality that is abigarramieto. Based on what has just been said about sociedad and formacion abigarradas, let us now consider what would happen if we extend the twentieth
century context explored by Garca Linera in order to say that the history of
modern Bolivia in its abigarramiento is the history of desencuentro. To say this
would be to approach the limits of any confidence in the possibility of a theoretical resolution to the uneasy conceptual relation between class and ethnicity
in Bolivia. The impasse or the desencuentro may well be irreducible. As Zavaleta shows, the fault line runs all the way back to the threshold of the modern
Bolivian Republic. Extending the thematisation of desencuentro would be an
important first step in promoting a deeper understanding of what it means
to say, with Garca Linera, that the republican state form in Bolivia has
always been colonial in nature, regardless of how the authority of its specific
11
16
Patrick Dove
The Republican State, whether it is conservative or liberal, protectionist or freetrade, is essentially a system of trenches and traps set against indigenous society,
against the ayllus and the peasant communities. There is not even a semblance or simulation of incorporating the indian, because what defines this State and the social
sectors that have united politically within it as governing power, is precisely a permanent conspiracy against the indigenous multitude. (Garca Linera 2009a: 177)
13
On the social count and the appearance of the part that is not a part, see Rancie`re
2004.
17
On the non-identity of time see Jacques Derrida, Ousia and Gramme (Derrida
1982) and, more recently, Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994, especially Ch. 4).
18
Patrick Dove
the national-popular revolution could be resignified after the fact in the early
1980s he was still thinking and writing from within the revolutions hegemonic period it may be that we are now in a position to ask whether and to what
extent the national-popular revolution and its impact can be said to contribute
to, or at least open up conditions of possibility for, the popular uprisings of the
early 2000s. In other words, we can ask whether or not the anti-neoliberal
insurrections of Cochabamba, El Alto and La Paz could have happened had
it not been for an earlier event that posited the underlying existence of equality
among all Bolivians regardless of their social and ethnic statuses. The other
tendency, which we have already looked at in the discussion of Garca
Linera, attributes whatever happened in 19521953 anything of historical
substance to the combined agency of the Revolutionary Nationalist Party
(MNR) and the working class while categorising campesino groups as relatively
passive participants who allowed themselves to be interpellated by a workingclass project. The fundamental problem in both cases resides in the explanations over-reliance on the concept of a political subject that would be the
cause capable of accounting for historical effects.
The dominant interpretations of the 19521953 revolution that are criticised by Zavaleta prove to be equally blind to the possibility that, while
people make their own history, they do not necessarily do so in the way that
they anticipate or imagine they are doing it. These interpretations are incapable of conceiving of the possibility that an event could be received and interpreted otherwise than what is intended or understood here and now, or they
are incapable of conceiving that the possibility of mutation and transformation
would not be synonymous with the failure of a historical project but instead a
condition of possibility for any event and therefore any history.15 It is interesting, writes Zavaleta in the Prologue to Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia, to note
the contradictory development of these factors [the historical occurrences surrounding the 19521953 revolution]. It is as if men intended to do one thing
and reality unfailingly took things in a different direction (Zavaleta 1986:
14). If things have a way of going off on trajectories that could not have
been anticipated by the actors themselves this is not necessarily a bad thing
for democratic politics; it would only by definition constitute an insurmountable problem for a political theory or rationale based on the presupposition of a
subject. In a similar way it may be that desencuentro, in addition to the negative
meanings it possesses missed encounter, failed opportunity and disappointment may also help illuminate how that which does not have a place in
history can return to incite and mobilise new aspirations for equality and
autonomy.
15
19
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Patrick Dove is Associate Professor in Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. His research explores intersections between literature, philosophy and
politics in Latin America, especially the Southern Cone. He is author of The
Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature
(Bucknell UP, 2004) and is currently completing his second book, Literature
and Interregnum, an investigation of literary responses to the crisis of aesthetic
and political modernity in recent Southern Cone narrative. He has also written
on political violence, dictatorship and literature and democracy, among other
topics.