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Nation Form, Community Form:

Nationalisation and Dialectic in Garca
Linera's Thought
Maddalena Cerrato
Published online: 04 Aug 2015.

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Nationalisation and Dialectic in Garca Linera's Thought, Culture, Theory and Critique, DOI:
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Nation Form, Community Form: Nationalisation

and Dialectic in Garca Lineras Thought
Maddalena Cerrato

Abstract This essay is a critical confrontation with Alvaro Garca Lineras

thought, through the analysis of the role played by the device of nation in the
articulation and chronological development of his political project. The conceptu-
alisation of nation is traced back to the Bolivian triple tradition of emancipatory
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thought: Marxist, Indianist and Revolutionary Nationalist. Turning Rene Zava-

letas perspective upside down, Garca Linera uses the idea of sociedad abigar-
rada not as a limit to the fulfilment of the construction of nation, but as the very
ideological material to successfully produce a hegemonic articulation for the pro-
duction of a new Bolivian nation form that guarantees political renovation and
social justice. He turns to the nation form as theoretical tool to organise a subjec-
tivist political discourse intrinsically tied to a logic of representation and hege-
mony. The nation represents the ideological universal form to which he refers
political subjectivation processes.

A social formation only reproduces itself as a nation to the extent that,

through a network of apparatuses and daily practices, the individual
is instituted as homo nationalis from the cradle to grave, at the same
time as he or she is instituted as homo oeconomicus, politicus, religious
. . . That is why the question of the nation form, if it is henceforth
an open one, is, at bottom, the question of knowing under what his-
torical conditions it is possible to institute such a thing: by virtue of
what internal and external relations of force and also by virtue of
what symbolic forms invested in elementary material practices?
(Balibar 1991: 93)

This essay is a critical reading of Alvaro Garca Lineras thought from the per-
spective offered by an analysis of the diverse conceptualisations of the ques-
tion of nation at distinct moments in his theoretical production. Even
though the nation does not represent the thematic core of Garca Lineras
thought, it undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in the development of his theor-
etical proposition as well as in the articulation of his political project.
I believe that nation offers a privileged point of view from which to focus

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 Maddalena Cerrato

the different tensions that run through both directions of his thought, because
it leads directly to the heart of the crucial matter of political subjectivation. To
analyse this texture, I turn to some of the arguments and concepts suggested
by Etienne Balibar in his critical discussion of the question of nation, especially
in the essay here quoted as epigraph, since Balibars ideas seem particularly
effective in shedding some light on the shadow zones of Garca Lineras
discourse.
From a broader view, this perspective is also particularly compelling
because it opens up the horizon of critical reflexion to another wider and
more general dimension that is concerned with the residual operating modal-
ities of the nation form after the twilight of the nation-state. The ideological
device of the nation should be considered as twofold. On the one hand,
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there is nation as a cultural-political paradigm of interpretation, according

to which every cultural and political object of analysis should be traced back
to its national matrix that is, referred to the frame of references of the
nation-state. Such a paradigm was absolutely dominant in Latin America in
the twentieth century, especially between the 1920s and the economic crisis
of the 1980s, but, as has been well noted, it no longer can command the
political-philosophical discourse in an economically and politically globalised
contemporary world.1 On the other hand, there is what Balibar refers to as the
nation form. This expression indexes the ultimate form of collective subjectiva-
tion in the domain of convergence of the historical and the political, the plural
form of modern subjectivity with respect to which historical narration took
shape: that is, the people. Balibar says:

In the case of national formations, the imaginary which inscribes itself

in the real in this way is that of the people. It is that of a community
which recognizes itself in advance in the institution of the state, which
recognizes that state as its own in opposition to other states and, in
particular, inscribes its political struggle within the horizon of that
state. (Balibar 1991: 93)

Here I am not suggesting that the nation form, insofar as it is a form of collective
subjectivation, is not weakened by the decline of the predominance of the
nation-state as a field of reference of political discourse. I would rather
venture to claim that the nation form has been kept alive, though in critical
condition, along with a certain trivial historicist representation of history, inso-
much as it is functional to the survival of the modern state-form, and to the
perpetuation of the subjectivist political logic of representation and hegemony
that sustains it. Indeed, renouncing the nation form would substantially imply
renouncing sovereignty of the modern state, since the nation constitutes the
mediation that allows the constitution of the people as the impersonal and
universal subject that sustains it through the principle of representation.
On a theoretical level, Garca Linera remains substantially entangled in
the subjective dimension of political imagination, as well as in a transcendent,
dialectical, even if not teleological, imagination of the historical course. Those

1
See Moreiras (2001) and Williams (2002).
 Nation Form, Community Form 3

are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. On the level of political projection,
Garca Linera is not ready to give up the nation because the national collective
subjectivation in the postcolonial world conserves a subversive ideological
potential that is difficult to replace. The nation form recalls the anti-imperialist
struggle, the fight against domination and oppression for independence and
equality; and such a reminder plays a strategic role in the context of opposition
to the transnationalism of global capitalism. But perhaps more importantly, he
is not ready to renounce the construction of a collective sovereign subject of
history, the construction of a counter-hegemonic subject able to actively
operate the revolutionary change while re-signifying the sovereignty of the
Bolivian state, keeping it alive. Hence, following the unfolding of the nation
form throughout the diachronic itinerary of Garca Lineras work, I aim to
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question how he seeks to redeem it from its definitive demise in order to

reclaim, on new foundations, the legitimacy of state-form.
The nation form to which Garca Linera turns owes its importance, poly-
valence and trickiness to its being the neuralgic point of a twofold decisive
dynamic inherent to his theoretical positioning in the Latin American political
tradition. It is, indeed, a pivotal dynamic of approaching-distancing, appro-
priation-rejection with respect to each one of the three main traditions of revo-
lutionary emancipatory thinking in a Bolivian, and Latin American, context:
Marxism, Revolutionary Nationalism and Indianism. It also constitutes the
point of confluence of those three traditions into one whole philosophical
horizon. Both dynamics help to determine how Garca Linera draws the
profile of the nation form and establishes the fundamental connection with
the community form; that is, the form of the local autonomies of Andean indi-
genous communities (ayllus). Among the different unfolding ways of this con-
nection between nation form and community form are found the distinctive
features of the diverse configurations of the political project Garca Linera
has presented at distinct moments of his theoretical production.
Far from simply adopting one ready-to-use conception of the nation,
Garca Linera develops his own idea, retrieving and transfiguring many key
features from the lively critical debate about nation in the 1980s in the circle
of Western Marxism (Balibar, Wallerstein, Hobsbawm and Andersen, for
example), as well as some leading concepts developed by the Bolivian
thinker Rene Zavaleta Mercado, particularly the latters late works. On the
one hand, the discussion within Western Marxism was especially concerned
with the connections among nationalism, racism and class struggles, and
with the contradictions of the nation-state. On the other hand, Zavaleta
instead focused on the historical structural problems of the construction of
political power as nation-state in the specific historical-social context of
Latin America and Bolivia. Both the Marxist debate and Zavaleta shared the
non-essentialist understanding of the nation as an historical and political
construction, and so does Garca Linera.
In broad terms, Garca Linera conceives the nation, insofar as it is a form
of collective subjectivation, to be the result of a political operation; that is, the
deliberate institution of a community resting upon a real historical, sociologi-
cal, linguistic, cultural and ethnic texture. Even though such a community
appears to itself to be a natural, original fact through which a certain collectiv-
ity is tied to a common destiny, it is fundamentally the product of an imaginary
 4 Maddalena Cerrato

projection. The nation is nothing but an historical, contingent, hegemonic con-

struction. And, since there are no essential determinations at its grass roots, by
no means can a comprehensive and general theory of the nation form be pro-
vided. All that can be proposed is a series of broad determinations to enable us
to make the construction of each specific national formation intelligible. Garca
Linera writes:

So, nations are political artefacts, political constructions which create

a sense of belonging to a kind of historical entity able to give a spirit of
transcendent collectivity, of historical sureness facing vicissitudes of
the future, of basic familial connexion among people . . . (Garca
Linera 2009b: 28586)
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and just a few lines later:

National formations are from the beginning performative discourses
with the strength to generate processes of construction of commu-
nities based on political consensus, by virtue of which people
define a we separated from a others, through the re-interpretation,
enunciation, or invention of one or more social components (for
example language, religion, ethnicity, history of domination), that
from then on become components of differentiation and ascription
to a community which guarantees to its members a collective sure-
ness into the same common destiny. (Garca Linera 2009b: 28586)2

Nation constitutes a subjective form of political community in history, free

from any essential bonds and thus free to re-interpret itself and to re-project
itself toward the future. In accordance with this concept of the nation, which
emphasises contingency and substantial arbitrariness at its origin, Garca
Linera organises his philosophical perspective on history that explicitly con-
trasts with the determinism of orthodox Marxism.
In fact, he ferociously criticises the tradition of orthodox Marxism, histori-
cally dominant in Bolivia from the 1940s through the 1980s, in both its Stalinist
and Trotskyist variations, which, despite their antagonism, shared the same
linear and gradationalist schematism in their understandings of history. This
Marxism coincides with an ideology of industrial modernisation and develop-
ment of the nation-state, considered inexorable stages of the revolutionary
programme, and therefore it remains incapable of producing any emancipa-
tory project responding to Bolivian social and ethnic reality. According to
Garca Linera, the teleological and developmentalist historical narrative, cano-
nised by Soviet manuals of philosophy and economy, comes to create a
cognitive block and an epistemological impossibility (Garca Linera 2008:
50) for thinking about the peasantry and the indigenous community as
revolutionary potential. Against this tradition, Garca Linera seeks a critical
renovation of Marxism, along the same path first inaugurated and followed
by the fathers of Western Marxism Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch, and, in

2
This translation from the Spanish original, as well as all others, are the authors.
 Nation Form, Community Form 5

his own way, Antonio Gramsci. This is the renovation of Marxism through the
rediscovery of the importance of Hegelian dialectics in Marxs thought, and
the affirmation of the key role of the dialectical articulation between subjectiv-
ity and objectivity against the materialist determinism of Soviet Marxism. This
way Garca Linera seeks the opportunity to mingle Marxist discourse with the
Indianist emancipation project. His first step in this direction is a reconfigura-
tion of the revolutionary collective subject that responds better than class to the
specificity of the Bolivian context, relying on the re-elaboration of some of the
theoretical reflections of Rene Zavaleta Mercado about the national-popular,
the motley society, and apparent state.3
Covering the three decades after the Bolivian national revolution, which
can be considered the apogee of Bolivian nationalist ideology, Zavaleta Merca-
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dos theoretical production addresses the very question of the historical con-
struction of the nation from a perspective that combines elements of
classical Marxism with Gramscis theory of hegemony. For Zavaleta
Mercado, the problem is how, in conditions of structural heterogeneity of
the social texture, to produce a national consciousness and a national-
popular bloc to allow for the constitution of a fully realised nation-state in
Bolivia. Indeed, Zavaleta Mercados notion of sociedad abigarrada (motley
society) which will be considered as the premise of multicultural theories
refers to disarticulated coexistence in a society of diverse modes of pro-
duction, historical times, symbolic horizons and political systems, which con-
stitutes the insurmountable limit to the hegemonic articulation that would
enable the fulfilment of a national-state project. It is the limit to the construc-
tion of a historicist narrative, which requires the achievement of a homogenis-
ation process of civil society that is at the same time a product and condition of
accomplished capitalist systems of production.4
Garca Linera turns Zavaleta Mercados perspective upside down.
Whereas for him the concept of sociedad abigarrada represents the reason
responsible for the failure of a successful historical hegemonic articulation
of civil society and state as nation-state, Garca Linera transforms the very
same idea of sociedad abigarrada into the fictive ethnicity of the new Bolivia.
The notion of fictive ethnicity is used by Etienne Balibar in The nation
form: History and Ideology (Balibar 1991: 96) to refer to the symbolic material
that creates the unity and sense of belonging among the people in a national
community. One could say that it is the idea of sociedad abigarrada that ceases
to be the limit impeding the hegemonic articulation of a national popular
bloc, in order to become the point of departure for a new constitution of the
Bolivian nation form, that is, the pluri-national nation.
Moving within the theoretical frame just outlined, I am proposing a criti-
cal reading of three diverse Garca Linera texts that may be considered as mile-
stones marking the development of his conceptualisation of the nation form

3
In the context of this article, I cannot get into either a deep and extensive discus-
sion of the work of Rene Zavaleda Mercado, or a complete analysis of Garca Lineras
appropriation of Zavaleta Mercados concepts. Cf., among others, the foreword by
Luis Tapia to Zavaleta Mercado (2009), and Freeland (2014).
4
Cf. Zavaleta Mercado (1981).
 6 Maddalena Cerrato

and its connection with the community form. Each of them may be considered
as a step toward a multi-ontological reconfiguration of the national-state form.
These are: the fifth chapter of Forma Valor, Forma Comunidad (1995), the essays
Sindicato, Multitud, comunidad (2001), and Autonomas indgenas y estado
multinacional (2004). These are three texts published within the 15 years
preceding the moment when Garca Linera started playing the institutional
role of Vice President in Evo Moraless government. They are three writings
(eventually) deeply bound to one another, even though each is significantly
distinct with respect to the historical conjuncture it is tied to as well as with
respect to the political horizons to which it refers. Those political horizons
are: Universalised Ayllu, movement of movements, and multinational state.
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Universalised ayllu
The topic of nation form plays a central role in the theoretical development of
Forma Valor, Forma Comunidad. Here Garca Linera addresses the question of
whether the model of Andean communities, as an embodiment of a pre-capital-
ist civilising order that could survive and subtract itself from the real subsump-
tion of capital, has a possibly universalisable emancipatory potential and thus
could establish itself as a new paradigm of general social self-determination.

Is there really any possibility of emancipation from the not-self-deter-

minative generality (or social totality) starting from the advance of
small local spaces of autonomy to which human life action is con-
demned today, knowing that a whole is never formed summing
parts? (Garca Linera 2009a: 15)

Here, what is at the stake is twofold. On the one hand, it is a matter of

Marxisms renewal from inside; that is, the self-criticism of Marxism as a
practical-theoretical device for the revolution in order to be able to serve in
the interpretation and emancipation of the Bolivian motley society. On the
other hand, it is a matter of opening up the identitarian and localist Indianist
discourse within a more inclusive and universal emancipatory project.
Trying to put Marxist structural analysis in tension with Indianist eman-
cipatory claims, Garca Linera resorts to Hegelian terminology and dialectics.
He turns to them against the tendency of a determinist reading of Marxs
analysis as a description of a teleological development of capital that reso-
lutely condemns the communal formations to be fatefully overcome and sub-
lated by the totalising capitalist universality.
Garca Linera proposes an alternative dialectic of history that requires the
assumption of a subjectivist wilful perspective in which the community form
overcomes localism and constitutes itself as community-nation. This means
that the community form is self-determining as a social totality, as a collective
subject that embodies the universality of the bourgeois nation form. In
order to accomplish the Aufhebung (the Hegelian overcoming-conservation),
of the capitalist civilising order, the community form has to sublate the
localism/particularism and constitute itself as community-nation, a concrete
universal that combines the local of ancestral community and the universal of
the bourgeois nation. In Garca Lineras words: It is a matter of producing
 Nation Form, Community Form 7

materially-subjectively-culturally-religiously the verification of the self-determi-

nation of the particular into the self-determination of the concrete universal
(Garca Linera 2009a: 366).
Schematising the possibility suggested by Garca Linera in a triad, we
have, first, capital in the position of the abstract universal which presents
itself as mere formal subsumption with respect to indigenous civilising
order; secondly, the community form opposing the former in the role of its par-
ticular negation; and, last, as synthesis which overcomes and preserves the
previous moments, the universalised community form. The universalised
community form that represents the singular as concrete universal, is what
Garca Linera calls Universal Ayllu.
Clearly, it is not by accident that the central chapter of Forma Valor, Forma
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Comunidad is devoted to the nation form. Here, indeed, there is the shift from
the commentary on Marxs Kapital to Garca Lineras theoretical contribution.
Consistent with the texts focus, the nation form is primarily presented on the
basis of its foundation in the economic structure; that is, as a social space in
which the product of labour is realised, this product having either the mercan-
tile form of value (bourgeois nation) or the form of use value (communitarian
nation form). The impulse for the construction of the nation form comes from a
specific kind of labour organisation, yet it continues being always a substan-
tially artificial and conjunctural configuration of political representation and
organisation, a hegemonic configuration that emerges within the antagonistic
political horizon of the colonial power.
So, even though one can talk about an Aymara nation resulting from the
confederation of multiple autonomous ayllus because of the historic form of
society they share, it is only the colonial threat that engenders the need for a
strategy of recognition of the belonging to a transcendent historical commu-
nity which allowed them to project themselves in the future: in this unity,
in its perpetuation, as it was and always had been transcendental (Garca
Linera 2009a: 220). In Garca Lineras words:

National language, national habit, national spirit are extensions pro-

duced by the condensed irradiation of the common character of the
partial sociality form in which the collectivity recognizes itself and
produces itself in the face of colonial adversities still valid today.
(Garca Linera 2009a: 220)

In the same way a new nation form will have to be established on the basis of
the community. It ought to be a non-capitalist nation form that retains from the
ancestral community the use of value form as a social form of labour product
and that, nevertheless, also incorporates the universality of the productive and
consuming activities under contemporary capitalist conditions, in order to
overcome the fragmentation and isolation of todays Indigenous communities
and achieve social emancipation. That form is the Universal Ayllu.

Movement of movements
In the last lines of the introduction for the 2009 re-publication of Forma Valor,
Forma Comunidad, Garca Linera writes: In a strict sense, I consider that my
 8 Maddalena Cerrato

later research about the labourers condition, social movements, state

formation, etc., is in part a thematic derivation of the conceptual matrix
worked on in this book (Garca Linera 2009a: 12). So, it is not surprising
that many of the elements already found in that huge work were also
present in Sindicato, Multitud, Comunidad (2001); however, here the focus
is very different. Whereas the first was strictly bound to the experience of
the Ofensiva Roja and the Ejercito Guerrillero Tupak Katari, this essay, as
the subtitle (social movements and forms of political autonomy in Bolivia)
suggests, is much more connected with the phase of the flowering social move-
ments inaugurated by the water war in January 2000. What is at stake is, first,
the analytical consideration of the structures of the diverse types of collective
action that marked Bolivian history since before the national revolution of
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1952. Garca Linera organises his comparative analysis according to six differ-
ent aspects: material conditions, aggregation structure, mobilising technique,
explicit and implicit goals, symbolic and cultural foundation of the collective
subject of the narrative involved and political (state and anti-state) and demo-
cratic dimensions. It is with respect to the last two aspects of this comparison
then, that Garca Linera aims to establish which kind of social movement has
the best potential for dialectic overcoming of present conditions toward social
and political emancipation.
In his presentation, Garca Linera turns to a triadic articulation, with a
Hegelian flavour, which has to do with historical development only to a
limited extent. In the Hegelian structure of the exposition, it is Garca
Lineras position on the topic that is disguised. Indeed, the triadic structure
tells us that in the context of Bolivian reality the trade union form takes on
the role of the abstract universal, unable to cover the complexity of the parti-
cularities gathered in the Bolivian motley society. Regarding this universal, the
multitude form represents its immediate negation, as the movement of the dis-
persed particular. The multitude form is indeed the movement of that part of
society which, rejecting the real subsumption under capital, remains out of
the subjectivation built by the trade union.
Even though the trade union form represents the basis of modern demo-
cratic culture and of many important class achievements, in its construction
of a collective subjective dimension, it is unable to transcend the limits of
the belonging to enterprise and, so, to the capitalist system of production.
Moreover, when the globalised economy transforms technical and organising
processes of labour, making the conditions of work unstable and crumbled,
the results are social desegregation and precariousness of the collective
subjectivation. And finally, perhaps even more importantly, the trade union
form moves into the framework of a rationality dictated by the state. This
means it presents itself in the face of the state as a petitioner party which, in
the act of demanding, reinforces state legitimacy in the monopoly of symbolic
and physical violence.
On the other side, the multitude form allows a wider range of possibilities
of identification and aggregation and is able to propose an alternative model of
exercising power. Garca Linera specifically distinguishes between the multi-
tude form he is talking about from the one proposed by Zavaleta Mercado,
as well as from the idea of muchedumbre. Both those forms, according to
 Nation Form, Community Form 9

Garca Linera, refer to the a popular collective subject whose action is essen-
tially characterised by spontaneity and in-mediation:5

We, instead, should employ the multitude as a bloc of collective action

that articulates autonomous organized structures of subaltern classes
around discursive and symbolic constructions of hegemony, and that
has the particularity of varying in its origin among distinct segments
of the subaltern classes. (Garca Linera 2009b: 378)

Nevertheless, it does not have the material and structural basis of continuity
that would enable it to produce a transcendent form of collective subjectiva-
tion able to guarantee the necessary sense of belonging and destiny and to
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act on a national scale. Since, in conformity with the fragmentation of the his-
torical conditions of work/labour, the multitude represents a territorial and
flexible form of collective action, it lacks permanent organisational mechan-
isms and institutionalisation. According to Garca Linera the mobilisation
power of the multitude, the insurgency potential of the plebeian layers of
society (la potencia plebeya, pueblo sensillo y trabjador), is irreplaceable
when it is a matter of calling into question the current structures of domina-
tion. However, lacking the symbolic ground for a collective subjectivation
transcending its constitutive dispersion, the multitude form results, unable to
embody a new principle of sovereignty and to constitute itself as a state.
In the third and last position, the community form is presented as a possible
figure of the concrete universal, the mediated unity of universal and particular,
which has the true potentiality of becoming an active subject in history: Volk,
nation.
The encounter between capitalism and community form has originated his-
torically two different processes of formal subsumption of the latter to the
former, one associated with Spanish mercantile and political colonialism,
and one produced by the productive and cultural colonialism put into effect
by the republican state grown out of the revolution of 1952. Garca Linera
refers to those two kinds of colonialism more diffusely in the essay I discuss
next, but what is important here is that it is against them that the Indianist
movement coalesced in different historical configurations. The last of these
configurations is the one that unfolds in the uprising of September/October
2000, and that, according to Garca Linera, should be valued as displaying a
pattern for the regeneration of Bolivian politics and government, which is
the pattern coming from the communal-Andean civilising order.
The point is that, through the mobilisation, an imaginative process
leading to the creation of a new identitarian subjectivity able to project itself
toward a shared and autonomous political future has been started this is

5
Zavaleta, indeed, employs it to differentiate it from the class form which put
forward a project for social transformation. Cf. Zavaleta Mercado (2009), in particular
the texts: Las masas en noviembre and Forma clase y forma multitud en el proletariado minero
en Bolivia. On this topic see also the discussion among Antonio Negri, Micheal Hardt,
Alvaro Garca Linera, Luis Tapia and Giuseppe Cocco in Pensando el mundo desde
Bolivia. La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia.
 10 Maddalena Cerrato

a nation. And this is not a nation like any other, but a nation founded on a civi-
lising order that, as Garca Linera says in the last few lines, is going to be able
to erode the domination structures and to widen the politicisation and demo-
cratisation practices of collective life during the years to follow. Being that way,
we would be facing the irradiation of two new forms of social self-determi-
nation (Garca Linera 2009b: 420).
Following the dialectic triad through which Garca Linera describes the
historical development of social movement forms in Bolivia, what slowly
becomes evident is that the ultimate political horizon is anything but the
immanent logic of the mobilization. Indeed, even though the social move-
ments are regarded as the frame of reference that Garca Linera has chosen
for this essay, his perspective is evidently informed by a logic of mediation
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and political representation. In the analysis of the new Latin American

social movements that Zibechi (2013) presents, representation is counter-
posed to expression as the specific political logic featured by the new
social movements in their non-state-oriented political action.

Whereas the logic of representation is separation and transcendence,

that of expression is one of experience and immanence. So the key
categories of representation are: consensus, articulation, opinion, expli-
cit networks, communication, and agreement. Those of expression are
encounter, composition, disarticulation, resonances and diffuse web.
(Zibechi 2013: 79)

The analysis conducted by Garca Linera does not consider the movement in its
immanence, but as an instrument to articulate a new hegemonic national for-
mation and generate the consensus necessary to achieve a transcendent goal
at the level of institutional politics that is ultimately, as we will see, the reno-
vation of the state. What is at stake here is the establishment of which historical
form of mobilisation is most likely to be able to reconstruct a new national-
popular bloc. In this perspective, the multitude form ends up disqualified
because it lacks the possibility of creating a durable collective subjectivity that
could be a vehicle of social and political transformation. The community form,
instead, according to Garca Linera, seems here to present two significant
advantages besides the system of production alternative to capitalism, the
object of the analysis of Forma Valor, Forma Comunidad. Those advantages are,
first, the fact that it represents a possible democratic mode of political power
management that, indeed, includes a normative dimension; secondly, the fact
that it features a strong identitarian dimension that facilitates the constitution
of a nation, a political subjectivity that seeks his realization as a new state.
I would argue, indeed, that the movement of movements for Garca
Linera has to finally lead to the state. As he states in 2007 in the first round
of conferences titled Thinking about the world from Bolivia:

Betting only on the social mobilization and on the possibility of great

collective actions, is desirable for any revolutionary. But, at the same
time, it results idealistic because society does not mobilize itself
permanently and incessantly; society also rests and then returns to
 Nation Form, Community Form 11

mobilize itself; then, it rests again; the lapse of those rests can be a
week or can be decades: it is unpredictable. (Garca Linera 2010b: 27)

Multinational state
The essay Autonomas indgenas y estado multinacional (Indigenous
Autonomy and Multinational State) (2004) is particularly compelling with
regard to understanding how Garca Linera projects the question of the
nation form into the political horizon of the state. Also, it gives a worthwhile
insight into the idea of a pluri-national nation that has led the Bolivian political
renovation of recent years.
In the first part of the essay, Garca Linera goes through the various mod-
alities of indigenous political exclusion from the Bolivian state before and after
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the national revolution. In the cases of the caudillista state (18251880) and of
the so-called cencitaria democracy (18801952), this exclusion was explicitly
normativised, and it represented the very foundation of state cohesion.6 After
the 1952 revolution, ethnic exclusion is rather disguised by euphemistic mech-
anisms, concealed behind democratisation. Indeed, following the revolution,
the state became promoter of an attempt at nationalisation from above
through mechanisms of spontaneous cultural homogenisation and the intro-
duction of an ethnic-linguistic hierarchy for actual access to citizenship. The
different forms of colonial domination and the ethnification of the indigenous
people for the purpose of their exclusion from political life, produced the
ethnic capital and the symbolic structures for building the manifold indigen-
ous historical-cultural identities gathered in the national territory, among
whom there are some that were able to establish themselves as communities
of belonging and destiny, i.e. as autonomous nations.
At this point Garca Linera makes explicit how his conceptualisation of
the nation form is related to the vexed question of the state, turning to Zavaleta
Mercados argument about the apparent state, even though it is not explicitly
quoted.7 The national political community may or may not come to be institu-
tionalised in a state. The state represents only an illusionary community, and
by itself is not able to produce such a political community as a national collec-
tive subjectivity. Without a nationalising principle, the state remains unable to
engender the synthesising fiction of society, so when this illusionary state com-
munity is the only operating feature, generally there is only space for author-
itarian institutions. Instead, when illusionary community results from
making the imaginary community (the nation) explicit through its institutio-
nalisation, we are in the presence of the processes of political legitimisation
and successful nationalisation (Garca Linera 2009b: 290).
In the Bolivian case, the situation is even more complicated because of the
disarticulated coexistence of multiple civilising regimes. Garca Linera defines
a civilising regime as:

6
The expression refers to the oligarchical republic, which ruled the country after
the end of the War of Pacific until the national revolution, in accordance with neoco-
lonial order.
7
See Rene Zavaleta Mercado Cuatro conceptos de la democracia (Zavaleta
Mercado 2009: 129).
 12 Maddalena Cerrato

a coherent collection of generative structures of a material, political,

and symbolic kind that organize in a differentiated fashion the
productive functions, the technical processes, the systems of auth-
ority, the political organization, in addition to the symbolic schemas
with which the extensive collectivities make sense of the world.
(Garca Linera 2009b: 288)

In this context, a state that would like to present itself as synthesis of Bolivian
society is to be not only multinational but also multi-civilising. A multi-civilising
state ought to be able to articulate diverse mechanisms of production and demo-
cratic regulation of society or, otherwise, it also has to be able to mirror the organ-
isation of the system of production and of political participation relative to the
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community form. From this point of view, the matter of nation becomes the
question of the multinational state, that is to say, the question of the
possible institutionalisation of a multinational nation. We may say that the
multi-civilising nation represents the flipped image of Zavaleta Mercados
motley society. Indeed, here Garca Linera, staying within the same boundaries
of the conceptualisation of the nation form we have seen, is putting forward a
state political project that consists of the institutionalisation and achievement
of the constitution of a national subjectivity on the basis of a multi-ontological
fictive ethnicity. Garca Linera moves from the contingency and the artificiality
of the nation form to sustain the possibility of initiating an identitarian subjecti-
vation process of a community where what is common is the identitarian sense
of belonging to a specific community-nation. The constitution of a nation does
not actually require a pre-existing ethnic community because it is a process of
moulding a collective subjectivity that is always namely the production of a
new ethnicity. The imaginary construction of the nation is the production of
the common on the basis of which a political community is to articulate itself
from below.
In this project, the first issue that is at stake is the recognition of ethnic,
linguistic and cultural identities considered coherently with the idea of
nation as imagined community and performative discourse, not as essenti-
alities or natural facts but as political and historical realities. Among those,
one should include the very same Bolivian identity which in this way plays
a double role: first, the role of one of the historical national identities among
others that should be preserved, and secondly, the role of an imagined com-
munity that needs to continue to be produced on the basis of the idea of
multinationality. The second issue at stake is this recognition must be differ-
ential and asymmetric: it should depend on the different degrees of national
cohesion of each identity, and it should be mirrored by the degree of
autonomy achieved by each national community with respect to
the superior political community of the Bolivian state (Garca Linera
2009b: 331).
There is here a sharp tension between the preservation of the autonomy of
the different civilising regimes, and the need for the institutionalisation of a
mestiza form of politics that guarantees the comprehensive functioning of
the Bolivian multinational and multi-civilising macro-nation; between the
preservation of already historically constituted national identities and the
favouring of what seems to be the only possibly effective nationalisation
 Nation Form, Community Form 13

process of the Bolivian motley society.8 This is because the process of nationa-
lisation in Bolivia as such can be achieved through nothing but the multina-
tional as fictive ethnicity, in which the community can recognise and
imagine itself in a common destiny in a single political future. Here, clearly
a quandary arises: it is whether this political future necessarily implies that
the realisation of such a historical nationalisation process would be also the
negation of its own premise. That is, whether the fulfilment of the continuous
historical process of nationalisation of the Bolivian multinational nation
insofar as it is a constitution of a macro multi-identitarian collective political
subjectivity in which each particular micro identitarian subjectivity would
feel represented would not imply a substantial process of transculturation
even with an identitarian rhetoric of heterogeneity.
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We have already noticed the debt of Garca Linera to a certain Hegelian

way of thinking, and the manner in which he links the nation form with the
state gives one more proof, as if it were needed. When he said that the national
construction is a political becoming that achieves maturity when institutiona-
lized as state (Garca Linera 2009b: 290), he substantially sticks to Hegels idea
that in the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve
itself as such (Hegel 1971: 279). In this sense, the project of the multinational
nation shows its paradoxical nature. The very same maturity of multinational
nation as multinational state (plurinational in the epithet set forth by the
Constituent Assembly) indeed requires all the other nations there gathered
to sacrifice their aspirations to the same kind of institutional maturity. They
have to be content with a certain degree of autonomy and a proportional
participation in the macro-nations institutions, which depends upon the
particular contingent level of national development of each one at the time
of the constituent phase of the new Bolivian state. It is a matter of hypostatis-
ing the diverse forms of identitarian subjectivation in order to make them fit
proportionally into the new state institutions of the Bolivian multinational
national. This is the fundamental kinship between nationalisation as state
institutionalisation and transculturation that Moreiras traces back to marriage
as the kernel of the Hegelian theory of the state:

The preservation of self-subsistent particularity and its interiorizing

integration into a state project is the modern state, understood on
the model of marriage. From this perspective, transculturation
theory, also based on marriage, on the accomplishment of productive
copulation, is a tool for the accomplishment of the Hegelian state.
(Moreiras 2011: 15)

Conclusions
Following the little shifts in Garca Lineras outlook and the growing impor-
tance accorded to the bond tying together nation form and state form insofar
as their institutionalisation, it becomes progressively clearer that Garca
Linera turns to the nation form because of its catalysing potential, with

8
Garca Linera refers to Luis Tapias book La condicion Multisocietal (Tapia 2002).
 14 Maddalena Cerrato

respect to the diversity of particular identitarian and social claims, in the con-
struction of a new hegemonic bloc which could wipe out the neoliberal order.
He is moving within the frame of reference of hegemony and counter-hege-
mony politics, and even though, at least abstractly, the higher goal at stake
is social justice, equality or, to stick with Balibars terms, equaliberty,9 the
immediate and more pressing goal is overturning the neoliberal creole hege-
mony. As Garca Linera (2010a) makes rather clear in his essay, El estado en
transicion. Bloque de poder y punto de bifurcacion, the aim was building,
through the correlation of political and symbolical forces, a national-popular
bloc of power able to substitute the administrative elites belonging to the
former bloc of power in control of political and economical decisions, and,
finally, able to overcome the bifurcation point and consolidate itself as a
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state structure. In this sense, one can say that Garca Linera essentially uses
the identitarian ethnic particularism strategically, in order to construct a
new hegemonic bloc capable of sustaining the project of a new, national-
popular state.
The nation form, to which multinationality is given as fictitious ethnicity (that
is, the material to build the community) works here as what Balibar called ficti-
tious universality, which he said could be labelled Hegelian universality as
well (Balibar 1995: 57). Paraphrasing Balibars text, fictitious universality is a
constructed hegemony, or total ideology not totalitarian but pluralistic by
nature, that is the institution and recognition of the individual as a relatively
autonomous entity. This is what Balibar refers to as a kind of Hegelian dialectic
of hegemony (Balibar 1995: 58). The individual is left free to play diverse social
roles, to join different communities of belonging, to keep several memberships,
while he remains a member of the superior community.

This is precisely what should be understood as (fictitious) universality:

not the idea that the common nature of individuals is given or already
there, but rather the fact that it is produced inasmuch as particular
identities are relativized and become mediations for the realization
of a superior and more abstract goal. (Balibar 1995: 57)

The internal tension between the national universal subjectivity and the individ-
uals particularity is nevertheless manifest at the level of the nationalization of
society. As Balibar cogently points out, the tension between universality and
particularity at work in the fictitious universality is funneled through the nor-
malization to which individuals are constantly exposed, which in this context
corresponds to a certain kind of transculturation. National universal subjectiva-
tion implies a continuous process of production and enhancement, through
education and ideological devices, of individual subjectivity toward its inte-
gration and adaption to symbolic standards and patterns of the imagined com-
munity; that is, the national normality. Of course, one can say that, because of
the class and ethnic composition of the new hegemonic bloc of power, it is no
longer a matter of neo-colonial transculturation (as in the case of the nation

9
With this notion Balibar aims to express the intrinsic reciprocal implication of
freedom and equality as a universal ideal. See Balibar (1995: 65).
 Nation Form, Community Form 15

form configured after the 1952 revolution). But even so, the hegemony politics
create a double register of thinking, as Moreiras (2001: 281) called it; one is
the fictitious one, which corresponds to the hegemonic game, and then, there
is the one that corresponds to the outside, the remainder, the level of what
exceeds the game and is excluded from it and that is Moreirass negative register
of the subaltern position. This is the space of critical thinking as an infinite exer-
cise of emancipation through recognition of contingency of any form of histori-
cal and political subjectivation.
In his essay about the ambiguity of universalities, Balibar suggested that, in
fact, fictitious universality could never exist without a latent reference to ideal
universality, that is, the one that exists in the form of absolute or infinite claims
which are symbolically raised against the limits of any institution (Balibar 1995:
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64). It is the ideal form of universality that contains a revolutionary kernel, a call
for freedom from any kind of imperial domination. And, undoubtedly, Garca
Linera is looking to this kind universality when he is sketching out the political
horizon of the Universalised Ayllu, and when he recalls the community form as
a model for the regeneration of Bolivian politics.
In principle, Garca Lineras idea of a multinational nation,10 whose gen-
ealogy has been traced here, also shows an inherent reference to an absolute
claim for equality and social justice. In fact, Garca Linera represented it as
the only possible way of mirroring Bolivian motley society into a project of
political universalisation that aims to keep together the diverse Bolivian civi-
lising patterns and to conflict openly with any residual structure of colonial
domination. Developing it, however, Garca Linera seems to have missed an
opportunity for a more radical subversion of the processes of political subjec-
tivation and representation toward a democratisation of politics. His idea of
the multinational nation quickly becomes just instrumental to the hegemonic
game and it loses perhaps too quickly its direct link with the realm of insur-
gency, the realm of the political unconditional, and, with it, its more
radical critical potential, trading it in for a better fit into the mechanism of
political representation.
As Balibar said about the nineteenth and twentieth century class struggle
that led to the incorporation of a number of rights of labour into the consti-
tutional order of the nation-states:

The process was Marxist but the result was Hegelian . . . To confront
the hegemonic structure by denouncing the gap or contradiction
between its official values and the actual practice with greater or
lesser success is the most effective way to enforce its universality.
(Balibar 1995: 62)

In the same way, we could say that while the process of building the multina-
tional nation, as envisaged and described by Garca Linera, was intended to be
Marxist, it actually turned out to be Hegelian in its result.

10
In Ciudadana y plurinacionalidad: lneas de tension en la reflexion del grupo
Comuna (Cerrato 2015), I have confronted Garca Lineras declination of the idea of
multinacional nation with the one presented by Luis Tapia.
 16 Maddalena Cerrato

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Maddalena Cerrato holds a PhD in Theoretical and Political Philosophy from

the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. She has published a
monograph on the thought of Michel Foucault (Mimesis, 2015) and she
teaches in the Department of International Studies at Texas A&M University.