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A Class Perspective on Social Ecology and the Indigenous Movement

James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer Crit Sociol 2010 36: 437 DOI: 10.1177/0896920510365208 The online version of this article can be found at: http://crs.sagepub.com/content/36/3/437

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Critical Sociology 36(3) 437-452

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A Class Perspective on Social Ecology and the Indigenous Movement

James Petras
IDS, Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia, Canada

Henry Veltmeyer
Saint Marys University, Nova Scotia, Canada

Abstract This article argues the need to turn back from a postmodernist pivot in social analysis to Marxism in theory and class analysis. We argue this point in regard to two contemporary issues of critical sociology: the dynamics of a growing worldwide ecological crisis and the current dynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America. Both areas of sociological analysis have been seriously affected by the retreat from Marxism and in need of class analysis. Keywords class analysis, indigenous movements, liberalism, Marxism, social ecology

Introduction
Like international development studies, sociology in the mid-1980s underwent and suffered what Booth (1985) and others (e.g. Schuurman 1993) described as a theoretical impasse. There has been surprisingly little theoretical reflection and analysis of what specifically was behind and led to this impasse but it was evidently about a generalized critique of structuralism, structuralist forms of analysis and associated ideologies and meta-theoretical narratives (Agrawal 2005; Lyotard 1987; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005b). One of the chief victims of this poststructuralist critique, which might well be viewed as the latest outbreak in a long series of attacks by philosophical idealists against all forms of social scientific, that is, structuralist and materialist, forms of analysis (Gulbenkian Commission 1996), was Marxism. In Latin America, for example, this poststructuralist critique, which was indeed leveled against both sociological positivism (liberalism) and historical materialism (Marxism) still the two dominant forms of social science led to
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a widespread abandonment of Marxist class analysis in what Best and Kellner (1997) described as a postmodernist turn in social analysis. That was then (in relation to Marxism see in particular Laclau and Mouffe, 1985)1 and this is today: a situation in which the wave of postmodern thought that had swept over the landscape and edifice of sociological analysis has ebbed and disappeared into the cracks of its theoretical foundation. The problem is that postmodernism might well be passe, much as the passage of an infectious disease that leaves behind a measure of relief but little of substance. But at the same time there is little evidence of a full recovery a return to the solid edifice that had been constructed on the foundation of Marxist class analysis. In this article we argue this point in regard to two contemporary issues of critical sociology: the dynamics of a growing worldwide ecological crisis and the current dynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America. Both areas of sociological analysis have been seriously affected by the retreat from Marxism, and in need of another dose of class analysis.

Liberalism vs Marxism: A Matter of Theoretical Perspective

There are two opposing approaches to the analysis of ecological destruction and the dynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America: liberalism and Marxism. The first can be defined in terms of its focus on the individual as the basic unit of analysis, and action, and the concern with freedom the right of each individual to act in the direction of self-interest and the expansion of choice and opportunity (Haq 1995; Sen 1999).2 Marxism, in contrast, can be characterized by an emphasis on the relationship of each class to the means of production and the class structure that results from the totality of these relations. In regard to the nature-development nexus liberals tend to emphasize universal responsibility for the destruction of the environment the rich and the poor, mining companies and miners, factory owners and factory workers, auto manufacturers and drivers, governments and citizens, real estate speculators and slum dwellers. In the same vein, liberal ecologists claim that the ecological crisis adversely affects everyone: We are all in the same boat and we all suffer from the destruction of the environment. A liberal approach to an analysis of the indigenous movement takes a similar form, using non-class categories of community, culture and religious belief to present the social structure of indigenous society as relatively homogeneous. In contrast, the Marxist approach to ecological destruction and indigenous social movements focuses on relations of production and power, an inequality of power relations vis-a-vis the means of production, the class dynamics of exposure to contamination in the workplace and neighborhoods, inequality in access to land and the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides and other contaminants, and unequal access to the instruments of state power. Marxists focus on the class structure, struggle, inequalities and the class dynamics of the presumed natural and environmental disasters unfolding in different parts of the world capitalist system.

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Marxists view the dynamics of ethnic and indigenous movements, and issues of politics, policy and leadership related to these dynamics, in terms of their relationship to the broader class system that is, through the lens and with the optics of class analysis. They eschew the liberal reform rhetoric and the discourse on indigenous identity the indigenist ideological assumption that indigenous society is composed of homogeneous communities in a direct relation to and in harmony with nature, bound together by a culture of solidarity and harmonious undifferentiated ethnic interests without class divisions or conflicting economic and political interests. This situation might once have described the indigenous communities at the base of Bolivian society. But today and increasingly so the penetration of capitalism and market relations, the extension of capitalist and socialist ideology, and the workings of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the governments and international organizations involved in the project of international cooperation to help the indigenous population adjust to the forces of change (modernization, industrialization and capitalist development) operating on them,3 have created a class-divided indigenous society. Even Bolivia, still defined as 67 percent indigenous,4 is today essentially a class-divided society, with well over half of so-called indigenous peasants landless or near-landless. Under these conditions many indigenous communities have been thoroughly penetrated, converting them into a massive proletariat, largely and increasingly dependent on labor for their livelihood.5 In actual fact, because of the continuing ties to the land in their communities of origin much of this indigenous population can best be defined as a semi-proletariat, laboring in the countryside off-farm, for miserable wages on the latifundia of the big and oligarchical terratentientes (big landlords), or in the ubiquitous informal sector of the burgeoning cities.6 In this context communalism or communitarianism has emerged as the political practice of the government formed by Evo Morales who has managed to achieve state power on behalf of, and on the social base of, the indigenous movement (Morales 2003). The problem is that communalism so defined serves as an ideology, a way of mobilizing the indigenous population, but not as political practice. The reason is that the level of the indigenous community at the base of Bolivian society communalism or communitarianism works (has effective outcomes) because it relates to a culture of social solidarity that is based on effective social bonds among comuneros, who are to some degree to the degree that they continue to live in the local community (many do not anymore, or as many inhabitants of El Alto, Bolivias second biggest city, return for the harvest or religious festivals) still living (or able to view the world) in a more direct relationship to nature.7 In this context, communitarianism functions as an ideology of an emerging indigenous middle class, a petit bourgeoisie that has turned to Morales and his regime for political representation, and an emerging indigenous political class in its contestation of state power.8 Even though the conditions for translating it into practice clearly do not exist at the national level, communalism allows this class to mobilize support in its bid for power (Petras and Veltmeyer 2005a).

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The Class Dynamics of Natural Disaster and Ecological Crisis

To demonstrate the relevance of class analysis to social and political ecology, and the validity of its application to the dynamics of the indigenous movement in the current context, we briefly review recent environmental issues and contemporaneous indigenous movements. We have chosen several cases of an apparent environmental disaster with large-scale and potentially long-term negative impacts that are all too familiar and well documented, even if poorly conceived and under-studied. They include the collapse of the cod fishery in the waters off Atlantic Canada, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and a food crisis of global proportions under conditions of global warming and global capitalism.9

The Last Cod: The Collapse of a Fishery

Atlantic Canada, a region of four provinces on the eastern seaboard of the country, for centuries and until recently was the location and centre of one of the richest fisheries in the world: the North Atlantic cod, which to all intents and purposes collapsed in the 1980s. The result was the loss of livelihood for thousands of people living and working in the small localities and communities scattered along the shoreline. These communities were of diverse ethnic composition ranging from Acadian French and Irish immigrants to diverse aboriginal (indigenous) populations such as the Micmac of Nova Scotia. What united the localities, i.e. inhabitants sharing space but little else are a few social bonds, some unifying institutions and a loose identity. In many cases these communities reflected a weak or fractured culture of solidarity, resulting from a capitalistic culture of individualism (the rational calculation of self-interest, achievement orientation), and a society divided between the poor and not so poor, some well-off and even rich (Durston 1999).10 Even in the outports of Newfoundland where communities were relatively homogenous in terms of source of livelihood (fishing), the shared physical space and ecology tended to be socially constructed, with social and class divisions that in many cases inhibited the formation of any culture of solidity or community spirit. Nevertheless, what they did share, in addition to physical space and ecology, was an abundant resource (the cod) that sustained the economies of the Basques and the Portuguese for centuries, and the livelihoods of generations of men and women in the new world settlements of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (Kurlanski 1997). The cod fishery was so rich and the resource so abundant that it sustained the livelihoods and communities of people on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing a relatively equitable social distribution of the social product, supporting thereby the formation of communal rather than class relations. Fishing was an industry based on the three large capitalist enterprises that operated near-shore and offshore, buying up the locally fished stock, and an occupation and source of livelihood for most members of the community. Marine scientists, most of whom lived and worked over a thousand kilometers away in Ottawa and in Europe, have published a legion of studies documenting the catastrophic decline in fish stocks, the destruction of

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livelihood of millions of small-scale fishermen and the loss of maritime high protein food for tens of millions of poor people. The cause of this disaster, according to ecologists and economists in the liberal tradition include rapacious overfishing by greedy corporate capitalists, contamination and environmentally unfriendly and destructive technology and practice, a failure of the state to manage the resource, even the rapacious feeding of seals, and climate change (change in water temperature, etc.). They failed to identify the class character of those responsible or the class dynamics of the capital accumulation process. It is evident that a large part of the crisis is indeed overfishing but overfishing is not just a matter of natural resource management. It is the result of the concentration and centralization of capital in the fishing industry, the workings of large-scale capitalist enterprises that operate massive factory ships with three-mile nets that drag the bottom of the sea, indiscriminately destroying fish habitats and pulling in undersize fish, thereby undermining the resource production cycle and destroying the ecology. Contamination, a problem that affects both the fish itself and its habitat, the waters on the Grand Banks of the eastern seaboard of North America, is a result of large-scale fish farms, the massive use of chemical fertilizers and the run-off of animal waste which destroy the delicately balanced coastal water ecology, as well as oil spills by big petroleum and shipping companies. State subsidies financed the growth of large fleets with high technology fishing gear, while state deregulation policies favored big fishing companies over the small local artisan fisherfolk and the inshore fisheries. In summary, the worldwide depletion of fishing stock is the result of environmental conditions induced by the operation of the capitalist system, namely the concentration of fishing industry in a powerful capitalist class, subsidized and promoted by the state, oriented towards and operating in the interests of corporate capital (Veltmeyer 2005b).

Hurricane Katrina: The Class Dynamics of Disaster Relief in a Capitalist State

In August 2006 Hurricane Katrina, with winds of over 100 miles an hour, hit both Cuba and the Southern Gulf Coast of the USA, especially Louisiana and Mississippi. The consequences for the people of Cuba and those two southern states were vastly different. Several thousand poor, mostly black, American citizens were killed while in Cuba, under essentially the same conditions, there were fewer than ten deaths. The difference in mortality was a product of the different social systems. Socialist Cuba has a highly organized and effective, centrally planned civil defense system that puts the highest priority in diagnosing and anticipating the storm and mobilizing tens of thousands of civilian and military personnel and sending thousands of public buses and trucks to transport people and their farm animals to safety. In the event of an imminent or possible environmental disaster Cubans are organized and mobilized to prevent even a single Cuban death. In contrast, the US Government, dominated by the ideology of free market capitalism and neoliberal globalization, gave a higher priority to national security, creating a repressive political apparatus (The Department of Homeland Security or DHS)

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that sidelined and weakened FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), which had been a model of government service, reducing it to a cash-starved, demoralized and broken agency. With its obsessive concern with shadowy terrorist threats, and its ruling class priorities, the governments ability to respond to threats to the security of its poorest working class citizens was seriously undermined. The results were catastrophic largely so in class terms. Hundreds of thousands of low-income residents were abandoned to the raging storm surge and floodwaters. The middle class generally had the wherewithal (private transportation, etc.) to escape the worst of the crisis, while the working poor bore the brunt of the hurricanes devastating force and the governments totally inadequate mobilization of transport, water supplies and food for the destitute. In the aftermath of the hurricane, Cuba gave the highest priority to rebuilding the homes of the displaced people whereas in the USA the capitalist state displaced the poor and promoted rebuilding to serve the interests of multi-millionaire real estate speculators, commercial interests and tourists. While the hurricane was a natural event, the unprecedented loss of life in New Orleans was not. It was the consequence rather of the ruling class priorities of the occupants of the White House. The obsessive concern of the regime with international terrorism led it, via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Patriot Act, to transform what had been a model of government service into a broken agency unequal to the task of rescuing the Katrina victims. The obsessive focus of DHS on shadowy terrorist threats undermined the governments ability to respond to a clear threat to its citizens. The capitalist character of the state led the regime to prioritize perceived threats to national security over basic civil defense. It favored commercial expansion and speculation over environmental safeguards, and self-reliance of vulnerable individuals to fend for themselves over state planning.

The Global Food Crisis: Capitalism as Normal

Liberal ecologists have argued that natural disasters, excess state intervention in the market and over-exploitation of land by peasants and farmers are responsible for the food crisis, defined as excess demand over supply leading to rising prices. Marxists, on the other hand, argue that free market policies under the Washington Consensus have resulted in the bankruptcy of millions of food-producing peasants and farmers. These policies have led to the concentration of landownership by giant agribusiness conglomerates that specialize in the export of staples and primary commodities, displacing or undermining local food production systems, so increasing the price of food for local popular consumption. Neoliberal policies of structural adjustment (privatization, financial and trade liberalization, deregulation) have accelerated the workings of what Marx had defined as the general law of capital accumulation the normal capitalist process of concentration and

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centralization of the means of agricultural production (land, fertilizers, marketing, farm machinery). At the same time the capital accumulation process has led to the conversion of land use by small and medium-sized producers of food for local markets and consumption by the people into agribusiness use of land for the production of agricultural commodities for the world market and the conversion of food (sugar and corn) for automobile fuel (ethanol). The conversion of food to ethanol, the most dynamic development in the process, has led to a massive invasion of finance capital into agriculture, as well as the demise and destitution of peasants and small farmers, increasing the price of food while lowering the purchasing power of the urban and rural poor, creating massive hunger in the process. The combination of the over-exploitation of land and the emerging global food crisis is the result of the expansion of agro-export production and what David Harvey (2003), after Marx, conceptualizes as the new imperialism accumulation by dispossession and the politics of expropriation and rapacious greed. At the centre of this process is the forced outmigration and proletarianization of the direct producer transforming small-scale landowners and land-income poor peasants into a semi-proletariat of rural landless workers. In some contexts (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, etc.), indigenous communities remain on the margins of the capitalist system as a rural proletariat of informal workers.11 The high price of agricultural inputs and food, and the low income of peasants in infertile regions, means that small producers have few financial resources to rejuvenate the productivity of their land. The food crisis is a direct consequence of the class dynamics of primitive accumulation and the expansion of capitalist agriculture a process that determines what is produced, the market for the social product and the cost of reproduction.

Global Warming and Other Dimensions of the Ecological Crisis

The capitalist development of the forces of production involves a large-scale, longterm process of productive and social transformation the conversion of an agrarian or agriculture-based society into a petty commodity industrialized and urbanized capitalist system (World Bank 2008).12 There is a widespread consensus on certain features of this process of structural transformation revolving around the capitallabor relation: 1) an unprecedented expansion of societys forces of production, leading to an enormous growth in the global stock of wealth and wealth-generating assets; 2) growing class divisions in the consumption of this wealth and access to societys wealth and income generating assets, and an associated polarization at the extremes of the wealth and income distribution; and 3) a propensity towards crisis, reflected in a structural incapacity of the system to expand the forces of production, generating in the process the objective and subjective conditions of revolutionary transformation.

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In recent decades, the propensity of capitalism towards crisis and systemic breakdown has been manifest in diverse forms production, financial, fiscal and political at the level of both economic activity and the ecological foundation of this activity. Today the crisis is manifest primarily, or most visibly, in the meltdown of global finance, putting at risk not just the speculative and productive investments of global capital but the savings and pensions (and thus the social security) of millions of people in the middle and working classes worldwide. The ecological crisis (in recent years materializing in the question of global warming) has come to the fore, overshadowing a more general systemic crisis in overproduction and unsustainable growth. This is a crisis brought back on the agenda by the deepening financial crisis that is assuming global proportions. The cause of this triple crisis (financial, production and ecological) according to liberal ecologists is the excessive and wasteful consumption of non-renewable resources and fossil fuels, the failure of state regulation and management, and the economic growth imperative of industrialization. Their concern is not with the systemic features of capitalist development, viz. its propensity towards crisis, but the need for more sustainable practices and careful resource management. Class analysis, on the other hand, provides a diagnosis that is at once more systemic and more specific. For example, the capitalist owners of the auto-industry were in a position and had the power to dictate transport policy that destroyed public transportation, eliminating subsidies and lowering budgetary funding for electric light rail while channeling billions of dollars into highways, bridges and road maintenance for private vehicles. The massive increase in CO2 was a result of the power of the privately owned automobile industry over publicly owned railroads. The widespread use of highly contaminating private autos was a result of advertising that promoted the purchase of big gas-guzzling automobiles depicting them as status symbols: The bigger the car, the higher the profit, the greater the contamination. Private and public manufacturers who operate on the market principle of increased production, lower costs and higher returns have been the driving force of industrial pollution. It is not industrialization per se that leads to pollution. The technology, productive and organizational processes that could substantially reduce or eliminate pollution exist but they would increase immediate costs and lower profit. State policies that deregulate control over pollution levels are the result of capitalist power. The problem of global warming is not the responsibility of individual car owners or workers in polluting factories. The responsibility for industrial pollution and high C02 levels leading to climate change rests in the capitalist class that owns the means of pollution and drives the accumulation process, the capitalist state with the power to regulate the means of pollution and the capitalist system that governs global production.

A Class Perspective on the Indigenous Movement

Liberal writers on indigenous movements and indigenous communities conceptualize them mistakenly as homogeneous. They understate the degree of capitalist penetration,

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class differentiation and subsequent political polarization. Liberal writers adopt a simplistic bipolar view in which classless indigenous communities are counterposed to an undifferentiated white society. Operating through this classless conception, liberals argue in support of communitarian politics and micro-projects. Their politics are based on a presumed culture of social solidarity in which cultural traditions are treated as bonds that link the upwardly mobile indigenous petit bourgeoisie, and an emerging class of political and business leaders, to the mass of landless rural workers and semi-proletarianized peasants. Marxist class analysis is based on several key theoretical assumptions grounded in solid empirical research and historical case studies. They indicate that capitalist penetration of indigenous communities deepened pre-existing social differences, leading to the formation of a class divided society.13 In this, a small group of indigenous leaders constituted themselves (and were capacitated to do so in a strategy of ethnodevelopment pursued, inter alia, by the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank (World Bank 1996, 2004) as intermediaries. The explicit goal of this strategy of ethnodevelopment, which targeted elements of the indigenous community with leadership potential, was to mediate between the communities of the mostly indigenous rural poor and the outside world. According to World Bank propaganda, these training programs were designed to ensure their inclusion in essential government services (education, health, etc.) and improve their access to the market, as well as capacitating the rural poor for self-development, empowering them to act on their own behalf in taking one of two pathways out of rural poverty available to them (labor, migration).14 Speaking in the name of indigenous communities, these intermediaries in fact were transformed into directors of nongovernmental organizations or capitalist entrepreneurs owners of transport (trucks), local commercial buyers and sellers, moneylenders, commercial farmers. Rather than sending their children to public schools taught in regional indigenous languages, their children went to private schools taught in Spanish in order to become professionals, politicians, lawyers and heads of NGOs specializing in indigenous issues and linked to foreign foundations, government agencies and the World Bank. These linkages between an upwardly mobile indigenous petit bourgeoisie and national and international capital have not been without tension, conflict and competition. Two types of conflict emerged. At one level the mass of the impoverished indigenous population is exploited by capitalist agribusiness via an expropriation or dispossession of their means of production by violent or legal (political) means. This exploitation has operated through semi-feudal forms of serfdom as well as the capitalist forms of wage labor (even slavery, in some contexts) and repression by the capitalist state. At another level, the rising indigenous petit bourgeoisie competed with and confronted the mestizo/European national and global ruling class, which imposed limits on their access to economic resources, finance, credit, markets and land and limited and marginalized their political role. The goal of the indigenous elite was to share power with the white oligarchy, not to overthrow it. Evo Morales, in his political practice since January 2006, when he assumed state power with the support of a mobilized indigenous movement, provides the precise

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formulae for class collaboration in a declaration of his intention to interact with the traditional oligarchs and emergent bourgeoisie as partners not bosses.15 To open the doors to the sharing of wealth and power, the marginalized petit bourgeois indigenous minority needed organized mass power to threaten, pressure and force an intransigent ruling class to negotiate with them. The politics of the indigenous social movements reflect the dual class basis of indigenous society: a revolutionary impoverished peasant mass base and a reformist petit bourgeois leadership. Political influence and government office had two different meanings for the two elements of indigenous society. For the mass of semi-proletarianized and poor indigenous peasants it means integral land reform, socialized and nationalized production in key economic sectors and communalism in the distribution and sharing of the social product. For the indigenous petit bourgeoisie it means collaboration with the productive agribusiness sector, the distribution of marginal public land and profit sharing between the indigenous and economic elite in the private and foreign-owned extractive sectors. The class differentiation within indigenous society and the emergence of conflicting economic and political interests, both overt and covert, became evident with the turn in the 1990s of a sector of the indigenous movements from mass movement-direct action politics towards electoral politics. Morales constructed a political instrument for contesting national and local elections. This turn towards electoral politics corresponded to a threefold fragmentation of the indigenous movement, with some elements oriented toward a social movement politics of mass mobilization, another towards electoral politics, and a third toward the non-power politics of local development based on a policy of administrative decentralization, good governance (the inclusion of civil society in the responsibility for social development and political order) and a community-based indigenous culture of social solidarity (Atria et al. 2004; Durston 1999; Lesbaupin 2000).

Ecuador: 20002003
In 2000 the Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the form of CONAIE played a leading role in the overthrow of the bourgeois government of Jamil Mahuad. Three years later the indigenous movement in the political form of Pachakutik, a party formed in 1995 to contest the national and local elections, entered into an electoral alliance with a retired military officer (Lucio Gutirrez). After Gutirrez won the presidency, Pachakutik leaders were appointed to several ministries, including the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Agriculture. Within a year, in total disregard of an understanding reached with the leadership of CONAIE, the Gutirrez regime proceeded to implement a neoliberal agenda, privatizing oil fields, repressing labor, defending and extending support to an amalgam of large agribusiness exporters, foreign multinationals and banks, and signing off on an intrusive security pact with the USA. In the wake of mass opposition at the base of the social movement, Pachakutik leaders in the government were forced to resign from office. CONAIE lost significant membership

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and was severely demoralized and fragmented. The mass of poor indios at the base of the movement were and felt betrayed by the political deals their petit bourgeois leaders had made with the oligarchs. Today, the movement is still a shadow of what it was in the 1990s, at the height of its mobilized social and political power when it managed to arrest the neoliberal agenda of several regimes, and depose several presidents.

Bolivia: 20035
Between 2003 and 2005 Bolivias indigenous movement of coca-producing peasant producers, led by Evo Morales, formed an alliance with factory workers, unemployed and informal workers of the city slums and militant miners to overthrow two bourgeois regimes, those of Snchez de Lozada (2003) and Carlos Mesa (2005). In both uprisings the petit bourgeois leadership of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) played a minor role in the mass struggle. Mainly it intervened to block a revolutionary transformation and imposed a neoliberal substitute (Carlos Mesa) in 2003 and a caretaker bourgeois regime (Rodriguez) in July 2005. In his bid for the presidency, Evo Morales and his followers channeled the social and political forces of resistance and opposition into the electoral process, which culminated in a successful electoral campaign for the presidency. After more than three years in office, property and class relations remain unchanged. Class and income inequalities between the European/mestizo ruling and middle class, and the indigenous majority of Bolivias rural and urban poor have remained in place. What did change was the social structure of indigenous society, as a whole new strata of former indigenous social movement leaders and civil society activists were rewarded with a number of mostly second level government positions. The Morales regime provided subsidies for restraining and channeling their followers into supporting the government. Numerous mestizo semi-professionals occupied high government offices and rose in the status hierarchy of wealth and influence. The mass of indigenous peasants, however, were demobilized and re-mobilized according to the tactical needs of the Morales regime in its negotiations with the big bourgeoisie. Moraless accommodation of the traditional ruling class led to its rapid recovery of power following the insurrection of May/June 2005. They did not agree to share power with the Indian President Morales. The issue in conflict was not inequality of land ownership, which was never questioned by the governing MAS regime: 100 European families in the eastern lowlands continued to own and still do 80 percent of the arable land in the region after close to three years of Moraless presidency. At issue was the sharing of political power, state revenues, and co-government between the flexible government of a petit bourgeois indigenous leader from the movements and an intransigent and thoroughly racist big bourgeoisie (Kohl and Farthing 2006; Webber 2005). The entire period of the Morales presidency became a struggle between petit bourgeois indigenous liberal democracy and a quasi-fascist European/mestizo oligarchy based in regional governments in the eastern lowlands. The middle class in this and other struggles fractured, some elements ranged in support of the government and some in political opposition.

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Faced with fascist threats to eliminate political freedoms, racial equality (constitutional citizen rights), access to individual social mobility, local autonomy and the right to collective organization, the indigenous peasants and working class masses overwhelmingly backed the Morales regime against the advance of the fascist ruling oligarchs. As a result, the real divergence of class interests between the propertyless and impoverished indigenous masses and the upwardly mobile pro-capitalist indigenous petit bourgeois professionals and leaders was subordinated to the common struggle against the racist and quasi-fascist capitalist regional power bloc.

Conclusion
The main conclusion derived from our brief analytical probes into several dimensions of the nature-society relation is that the dynamics of this nexus cannot be understood except by reference to the workings of a global capital accumulation process. In regard to the indigenous question our study of Ecuador and Bolivia point towards communitarianism as an ideology of a rising indigenous petit bourgeoisie concerned to undermine intra-indigenous class struggle. The defining reality of indigenous society in the Andes is that it is class divided. This division is reflected in a conflict between a petit bourgeoisie struggling to join and share power with the dominant class and a mass of impoverished indios without property or influence over state policy. In short, there are two intertwined class struggles, one led by a new political class of indigenous professionals to consolidate a liberal democracy and backed by the masses mystified by religious and cultural symbolism, and another led by class conscious predominantly indigenous workers and peasants against the ruling class and their own indigenous petit bourgeois leaders. Our analysis suggests that neither the ecological nor the indigenous movements is homogeneous in the economic and political interests at issue. Beneath a veneer of common goals against ecological destruction and exploitation of indigenous peoples are two diametrically opposed ideologies liberalism and Marxism based on different class interests and political agendas. Marxism as ideology and theory highlights the centrality of property in the means of production and the class dynamics of the associated social relations and politics as critical to understanding the destruction of the environment and indigenous politics. The classless form of analysis and approach advanced by liberal ecologists and the ideologues of indigenous communalism is found to be seriously flawed. The liberal approach is intellectually inadequate and politically disastrous. It fails to provide the intellectual and political tools needed to generate an effective, globally sustainable, environmental movement. Liberal communitarian ideology does not provide the intellectual basis for the emancipation of the urban and rural poor and the indigenous peoples in Latin America. Environmental sustainability and indigenous liberation are inextricable parts of the class struggle against the further advance of capitalism. To this end, what is needed is a clearer understanding of the workings of capitalism. There is no solution within capitalism to

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the problems of an impending ecological disaster, the world economic depression, or the multiple forms of exploitation faced by indigenous peoples. A minimal condition is a reconstituted form of class analysis as a guide to an eco-socialist revolution.

Notes
1 For a critique of Laclau and Mouffes efforts to transcend Marxism in a poststructuralist critique see Veltmeyer (2000). For more general critical discussions of the theoretical impasse vis-a-vis Marxism and other forms of structuralism, and the postmodern turn in social and development analysis, see Brass (2000), Petras and Veltmeyer (2005b), and Veltmeyer (1997). 2 This assumption and precept defines liberalism in its diverse forms: neoclassical economics in its belief in the magic of the market; the new political economy of Kreuger, Bates etc. in its conception of the state as a predatory apparatus subject to rentierism (self-seeking behavior of state officials and occupants of state power); and political science in the tradition of liberal democracy. Liberalism also underpins the mainstream development thinking and practice in the field of international development and permeates all of the concepts (human development, development as freedom, empowerment, equity, etc.) within this framework. On this see Veltmeyer (2007). 3 Sociologists and theorists of development have conceptualized the process of long-term societal change in terms of three meta-theories, each associated with a distinct narrative: 1) modernization (transformation of a traditional system into a modern one); 2) industrialization (transformation of an agrarian society into an industrial society); and 3) capitalist development (the productive and social transformation of a precapitalist system based on direct production into a modern capitalist system of commodity production and wage labour). On these meta-theories see OMalley (2010) and Veltmeyer (2009). 4 Fifty-five million indigenous persons, or 400 indigenous peoples, inhabit Indo-Afro-Latin America. Most reside in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. They reject the Europe-imposed term Indians and call themselves the native peoples (Ios pueblos originarios in Spanish). They are estimated to constitute 67 percent of Bolivias population and 40 percent of Ecuadors. 5 Labor takes two major forms in Bolivia and other such contexts: wage labor and self-employment (labor, or micro-enterprise, in the unstructured informal sector that makes up close to one half of the urban economically active population (Portes et al. 1989). 6 In Bolivia it is estimated that just three latifundistas in the Eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz own as much land as 21 counties combined. This level of concentration in the ownership of land is not unusual; indeed it is the norm in much of Latin America (Kay 2000). 7 Indigenous culture is generally understood in these terms. Thus, those that partake of this culture and live in the world that it constructs are very conscious of their connection to nature and to each other, viewing the natural world (mother earth, etc.) not as a productive resource for profit making but as the common heritage for all humankind. By the same token, adherents of this view and participants in this traditional culture do not recognize the rights of private (or public, for that matter) property over the land to privatize the commons. 8 In an interview with Punto Final (May 2003, pp. 1617) Evo Morales, leader of the major political force on Bolivias left and currently in the country, the Movimiento al Socialismo-Instrumento Poltico para la Soberana de los Pueblos (MAS-IPSP), defined socialism in terms of communitarianism. This is, he notes, because in the ayllu (the principal Aymara territorial unit) people live in community, with values such as solidarity and reciprocity. This, he added, is our (political) practice.

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9 Notwithstanding the depth and severity of the social crisis, an even worse crisis is looming, threatening to take down the basic pillars of the economic production and development process. This crisis has to with the ecological foundations not only of the economic production process but life itself. The logic of capital accumulation and the economic processes of industrialization and modernization have pushed the system well beyond its ecological limits. Ecologists of various persuasions have raised their voices in unison about an impending ecological crisis evident in the clear signs that the carrying capacity of the earths ecosystem has been stressed well beyond its limits, with an irreparable and irreversible damage to the systems that sustain human life and livelihoods. The collapse of fish stocks discussed below is but one small part of this process which has been well documented, and analyzed in depth but to little avail (and, in any case, too little, too late). 10 The new paradigm of empowerment of the poor, based on a policy of decentralization, local development and social capital, and promoted by diverse advocates of a more socially inclusive form of neoliberalism, is predicated on a community-based culture of solidarity (Razeto 1989, 1993). Unfortunately for the proponents of this paradigm, more often than not, according to the ECLAC economist John Durston (1999), this traditional or indigenous culture in many cases has been weakened by the incursions of a capitalistic culture and economic practice, which in effect has tended to extinguish this community spirit, transforming local communities into mere localities (Veltmeyer and OMalley 2003). 11 The informal sector is composed of enterprises (businesses) or activities (self-employed labor) that are unable to make use of the legal apparatus of the state. See De Soto (Albright and De Soto 2007) or the World Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor for a sanguine view of this development as an opportunity for the poor to exhibit or cultivate an innate entrepreneurial or capitalist spirit. 12 For a critique of this conception of long-term social change, and the theory of modernization underlying it, see Veltmeyer (2008). 13 Bengoa (2000) attributes the emergence of identity politics among indigenous peoples in Latin America to one of several unanticipated effects of the forces of globalization that have swept the region. Indeed, one of the ironies of these so-called forces is that at one and the same time they seem to have helped spread the ageless struggle for universal human rights and social justice, accentuate a myriad of local particularities, and shape the formation of new ethnic and national identities and conflicts across the world. In the 1990s, this resurgence of the indigenous question took the form of widespread mobilization of the most diverse social forces organized over the previous decade, primarily in the struggle for land and opposition to exclusionary government policies. The decade began with a major uprising, in May 1990, of indigenous peasants in the highlands of Ecuador, and within a few years, in January 1994, there occurred, in Chiapas, Mexico, one of the most significant irruptions of indigenous struggle onto the stage of national and regional politics in Latin America. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas brought the struggles and social movements of indigenous peoples across Latin America onto the center stage of world history, thereby extending the short century declared by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1984) and giving the lie to his view that the indigenous question, like that of the peasantry, had disappeared into the dustbins of history. In subsequent years, from 1994 to the present, the uprising of indigenous peasant farmers and communities in Ecuador and Mexico became part of a broader popular movement. By the end of the decade and turn of the new millennium, the indigenous question in Latin America had taken center stage in a broad popular struggle against the forces of modernization and change, neoliberalism and global capitalism. 14 In this strategy the World Bank (2008) conceptualizes three pathways out of rural poverty but it is all too aware that the vast majority of the indigenous rural poor are blocked from taking the pathway of farming, requiring as it does conversion into capitalist entrepreneurs with access to capital and technology as well as the market.

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15 In May 2007, in the context of legislation allowing the government to renationalize ownership of the countrys mineral resources, the government renewed contracts with 42 oil companies on the basis of a joint venture or partnership arrangement. In this context the government announced that we do not need bosses; we need partners.

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For correspondence: James Petras, International Development Studies, Saint Marys University, 923 Robie Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. B3H 3C3. Email: jpetras@binghamton.edu Henry Veltmeyer, International Development Studies, Saint Marys University, 923 Robie Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. B3H 3C3. Email: hveltmeyer@smu.ca

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