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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006Bolivia today: Liberation or statism?by Jorge Virana Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Mitch Weerth of excerpts of an essay by Bolivian activist and theoretician Jorge Viana entitled, "Tiempo estatal vs. tiempos de emancipacion (or “The rhythm of the State vs. the rhythm of emancipation”). * * * El Alto, Bolivia--In Bolivia we’ve lived with six years of insubordination under an intimidating state. Now the actions of a new state rather than the fatalism of a “cycle of waning protest” may be causing us to enter a time where our lives will be purely state-centered. The predominance of organizing and action by the state suggests that the time of struggle and insubordination be abandoned. It is the organization of forgetfulness of the period of insubordination, independent of the good or bad will of individuals. The capital form implies a certain temporality, and the state is part of that temporal form. From my point of view, this might determine a regression induced by the state and not a fulfillment of the aims of a “cycle of protest.” The electoral victory in Bolivia of Evo Morales of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), with 54% of the vote, was a victory against the oil interests, the oligarchy of Santa Cruz, the parties on the Right, and the conservative colonial forces and transnational capital. Our enthusiasm for the victory, however, does not allow us to be imprecise. The victory was not the result of a combination of a strategy of mobilization with an electoral strategy. It was fundamentally a reflection in a liberal electoral scenario of the self-organization of the multiple collectivities mobilized in recent years. This is a victory of the social movements and not of any party, although momentarily a few charismatic leaders, intellectuals, and one party have assumed the role of protagonist. The victory was not due to the rational abilities of any intellectual. Turning these secondary factors into the fundamental ones is what constitutes the error of fetishism. The most serious effect of this kind of error is that it deepens and stabilizes a personality cult, one that is supposedly indispensable, a cult that has done so much damage to the struggle. With great sadness, we’ve watched as individuals come to symbolize an entire movement and adopt the habits of the indolent ones who rule over the suffering, who internalize the perverse logic of the era of the State, the era of Capital. I must insist: the electoral triumph was due to the anonymous abilities of the multiple self-organized collectivities. With many mechanisms of collective deliberation and action, they have been capable of responding to the political challenges confronting them. It is the triumph of a collective intellectual that has nestled in the assemblies, town councils, barrios, ayllus, appealing to its short term memory of the last 20 years of neoliberal spoilation and its long term memory of 500 years of colonial oppression. The MAS has simply capitalized on this reality in the electoral arena. We celebrate the MAS victory because it is the victory of the self-organization and brilliance of anonymous people. This same brilliance is what requires us to clarify, after the celebration, the true relationship of the factors at play. Once again, the typical phenomenon of fetishism that capital imposes on us is what has made the charismatic leaders and the party apparatus appear as that which has made history. The true social relations get inverted. There are other types of alienation and fetishism produced by the struggle. To conserve or consolidate what has been won, we start to alienate ourselves. In other words, we tend to differentiate tasks, institutionalize activity, create structures that start to anchor our existence in what Jean-Paul Sartre once called the practico-inert and no longer in transformative human praxis. The “epoch of change” anchored almost exclusively in the exercise of state power may become the point of departure for the predominance of the practico-inert over human praxis, which will be expressed by coopting the movement, institutionalizing it, forcing it to lose its autonomy. The State implies a kind of alienation of time. It is the fundamental machinery for the alienation of the time of struggle. The temporality of struggle and the preservation of autonomy and the capacity for criticism and independent activity of social movements are incompatible with the dynamics of the State. Pardon me--perhaps I don't understand the logic of the old dogmatic Left that wants to unify every social movement under theumbrella of a few initials, that imposes the idea of reducing the enormous creativity of the subalterns to the dynamic of the State, where all must be synchronized. Perhaps I don't understand the need for what some in the city of El Alto have been calling for: “All must line up with MAS!” Isn’t this an attempt to program the movement to the needs of governability? If it continues, if it becomes the dominant trend, it will mean the predominance of object over the subject, the alienation of six years of struggle--regardless of the good will and sincerity of those companeros who have accepted positions in the State. We will lose six years of struggle if the so-called economic model of “Andean-Amazon capitalism,” centered in a “strong state” that makes a pact with power rather than constructing another power, becomes the dominant force. We will be living the “transformation of qualitative human attributes into the quantitative attributes of inert things,” the predominance of a state that must sterilize the capaity for creativity that has been born and nurtured. |
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