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Abstract This essay looks at the history of the Bolivian Left in the light of a
repeated desencuentro a pattern of misunderstanding and missed opportu-
nities between conceptual categories proper to Marxism and indigenism.
This structure of missed encounters can be traced at least as far back as the late
eighteenth century, when Andean indigenous insurrections against Spanish colo-
nial power preceded criollo (of European descent) independence by a mere few
decades. It also figures prominently in twentieth century Bolivian history,
when Marxian-inspired national popular movements tended to subjugate racial
and ethnic categories beneath the concept of class. In the recent uprisings
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In his 2005 essay Indianism and Marxism: The Missed Encounter Between
Revolutionary Logics, Alvaro Garca Linera, a long-time political activist,
public intellectual and (at the time of this writing) Vice President of Bolivia,
examines a history of misunderstanding and missed opportunities that have
prevented class-oriented revolutionary projects and ethnically-focused deco-
lonisation projects in Bolivia from joining forces against an oligarchic order
founded on racially-coded logics of exclusion, domination and exploitation.
As conceptual categories, ethnicity and class have all too frequently been
treated by contestatory movements as if they belonged to separate and irredu-
cible worlds or, even worse, as if they were the two poles of an opposition in
which one term was synonymous with truth while the other was equivalent
with false consciousness or bad faith. This is a problem that has divided the
Bolivian Left for most of the past century or more, and it illustrates why
efforts to apply Marxist theory to Latin America in a way that subjugates
ethnic and racialised elements of colonial experience to a general economic
rationale are bound to fail.
The purpose of this essay is two-fold. In the first part, I provide an over-
view of Garca Lineras discussion of the factors that have split the Bolivian
Left since the beginning of the twentieth century. I also propose that the his-
torical narrative of desencuentros could and should be extended further back
than the time period he examines. In the second part, I explore an alternative
theoretical approach to the desencuentro topos, one which supplements the
temporal framework of Garca Lineras discussion desencuentro is literally
a non-encounter with a spatial frame. For this I turn to the Bolivian
Marxist thinker Rene Zavaleta Mercado, who developed a concept of abigarra-
miento [a heterogeneous or disorderly arrangement of things: colors on a
sweater or flag, or races and ethnicities] in order to think about social and
ethnic heterogeneity in Bolivia. It is only when we bring Zavaleta and his
spatial metaphorics into the picture that we begin to see how the problem of
desencuentro is not limited to the Left or the twentieth century but is in fact
coterminous in Bolivia with modernity and its ways of understanding histori-
cal time. Finally, Garca Linera understands desencuentro as an unfortunate
consequence of the shortsighted academicism that has afflicted Latin
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1
All English-language translations in this essay are my own.
4 Patrick Dove
With very few exceptions, Bolivian Marxism of the republican epoch regarded
the cultural practices of indigenous communities as backward relics of an
archaic past that would need to be modernised and homogenised before the indi-
genous could be considered social and political subjects capable of making their
own history. By implication, any political claim or discourse that might emanate
from indigenous communities could only be understood by this academic
Marxism as inchoate babble or as melancholic adherence to the past.
The theoretical and practical problems described by Garca Linera are
interrelated and presuppose one another. For one, if Bolivian Marxism
aligns its theoretical practice with a stagist and deterministic philosophy of
history that effectively discounts the experiences and ways of life of more
than half of Bolivias inhabitants, this academic Marxism turns out to be
the uncanny double of the republican state. Garca Lineras essay illustrates
2
See Garca Lineras Introduction to the Kovalevsky Notebook, included in the
first part of La potencia plebeya (Garca Linera 2009c: 31 52).
The Desencuentros of History 5
moments can, it seems, be said to reflect its own specific desencuentro, a discre-
pancy or non-agreement over how the social is constituted: who is authorised
to define the criteria for social membership, who belongs where and is author-
ised to do what, what counts as intelligible speech and so on.5 The first of these
three nodal moments belongs to the immediate prehistory of the republic. It is
found in a series of sympathetically-aligned indigenous uprisings in the
Andes during 1780 1781, which began in Cuzco (present-day Peru) under
Tupac Amaru II, a descendant of Incan royalty, and then spread to the area
around El Alto in what is present-day Bolivia, where an indigenous commoner
named Tupaj Katari led an Aymara and Quechua insurrection that temporarily
liberated the surrounding countryside from Spanish colonial control. Kataris
indigenous army soon arrived at the walls of La Paz, and although they laid
siege to the colonial city for five months, they were unable to breach its
walls. They similarly failed to muster support among the urban creole and
mestizo populations, who are described by many historians as recoiling in
horror from the spectre of an Indian uprising. Kataris rebellion was finally
put down by Spanish reinforcements sent from Buenos Aires in late 1781.
3
See, for example, Jeffrey Webbers account of how the Morales administration
has adopted neoliberal austerity measures while also prioritizing the fostering of
foreign and transnational investment in extractivism over the concerns of Bolivias
peasant and indigenous sectors in Webber 2012.
4
In an interview with Pablo Stefanoni, Garca Linera is asked about persistent cri-
ticism from indigenous groups. In his response he characterizes dissident groups as
being behind the times, and in his recourse to this metaphor of temporal delay he
silently invites the question of just how far the Bolivian left has advanced in its think-
ing since the time of its academic Marxism: it seems likely that some social organiz-
ations are still somewhat behind the times in terms of their historical situatedness.
They are still resisting against the State and its hard for them to put themselves in
this new time of occupying power structures (Stefanoni 2006: n.p.).
5
I am of course alluding here to Rancieres notion of the distribution of the sensi-
ble (Ranciere 2004).
The Desencuentros of History 7
sus over such matters as the independence of the State or the imper-
sonal nature of the law, preventing the self-constitution of an Indian
multitude is by contrast a resolute and undebatable objective
shared by all parts of this society that has been built upon the
Indians shoulders. (Zavaleta 1986: 145)
It is the locating of fear and horror at the thought of an Indian uprising at the
foundation of Bolivian modernity that best explains why it is that the Bolivian
republic has always been colonial in nature. The second nodal point discussed
by Hylton and Thompson is the national-popular revolution of 1952. Sparked
in part by militant factory workers and miners under the leadership of the
Nationalist Revolutionary Party (MNR), the 1952 1953 popular revolt over-
threw a long-standing seigniorial oligarchic regime while promoting a range
of social reforms including universal suffrage, free public education, land
reform facilitated by the breakup of latifundios in the altiplano, nationalisation
of tin mines and the formation of the Centro Obrero Boliviano (COB), which
would quickly establish itself as one of the most militant labor organisations
in all of Latin America. The official discourse of the national-popular revolu-
tion showed little interest in social problems associated with race and ethni-
city, and explained the need for land reform in a socio-economic language
of workers rights while ignoring the colonial and hence racial or ethnic
origins of expropriation and accumulation of land. However, the fact that
the national-popular revolution promised full citizenship and social mobility
to historically-marginalised indigenous groups while also inserting itself as a
mediator of historical structures of domination and exploitation helped to
install the national-popular imaginary as a new epochal horizon for the
entirety of Bolivian society. This was the case regardless of the fact that the
revolutions democratic character was compromised by a series of military
6
For examples of the racial denigration of indigenous-led popular social move-
ments see Webber 2011, especially Chapter 5.
8 Patrick Dove
7
As Garca Linera describes it, the post-1953 period was defined by the de-ethni-
cization of campesino discourse and thought, in favor of imagined inclusion in a cohe-
sive mestizo cultural project of the State, together with the conversion of nascent
campesino unions into a base of support for the nationalist State in its mass democratic
phase (1952 1964) as well as its dictatorial phase (1964 1974) (Garca Linera 2009b:
484).
The Desencuentros of History 9
8
See Webber 2012 for a forceful account of how the MAS state does not do away
with neoliberalism in Bolivia. In Webbers view, neoliberalism continues more or less
10 Patrick Dove
by the structures of power that had been in place since the colonial era. The
development of political reason in post-independence Bolivia remained
stunted by a quasi-feudal form of social organisation (gamonalismo) that pre-
vented the emergence of the forms of totalisation and universality associated
with the modern nation. Under gamonalismo, the democratic idea of equality is
simply inconceivable. Scholars typically categorise the work of Zavaleta into
three periods: early writings defined by the nationalism of the 1950s; a
middle phase in which disillusionment with the PRN and the authoritarian
state prompted Zavaletas turn to orthodox Marxist revolutionary thought
and a final period defined by an unconventional version of Marxism
through which he sought to take seriously the specific forms of social and
ethnic heterogeneity found in Bolivia (Antezana 1991: 117 18). Rather than
accepting the axiomatic equation of the forms of social heterogeneity found
in Bolivia as an obstacle for the alliances and interpellations required by
radical politics, Zavaletas later work looks at how the history of capitalist
modernisation in Bolivia over the past two centuries or more brings together
structures of exploitation and domination, and how the racial politics of this
colonial system go hand in hand with the form of accumulation specific to
gamonalismo.
Zavaleta used the terms sociedad abigarrada and formacion abigarrada to
describe and theorise the heterogeneous tapestry that is Bolivian social
reality. There are resonances to be found between abigarramiento and desencuen-
tro. In its customary usage, the Spanish term abigarrada delivers a negative aes-
thetic judgment. It could be used to refer, for instance, to colors that clash or to
a jumbled and motley mixture of elements that does not add up to a coherent
unabated in Bolivia today, albeit under a different name, in the form of austerity pol-
icies, the aligning of national development with the interests of global capital and the
opening of the national economy to global markets and, moreover, the recodification of
this opening to global capital as a pre-political decision that cannot be opened up to
public debate.
The Desencuentros of History 11
9
The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category:
that of the latifundistas or large landowners. It is a much broader social system, rep-
resented not only by the gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries,
agents, parasites, etc. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns
into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hege-
mony of the semi-feudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government
(Mariategui 2007: 26, note 1).
12 Patrick Dove
philosophy of history that is inherited from Hegel, i.e., based on the supposi-
tion that every time is defined by its own characteristic mode(s) of production,
and that there is a logical sequence to be followed in moving from lower to
higher stages in world history. Antezana understands this alternative con-
ceptualisation as seeking to accomplish what Trotskys uneven and combined
development sought and failed to bring about: a break with, or at the very
least a hiatus within, the Hegelian narrative of development. The limitations
of uneven and combined development are exposed through its inability to
avoid reproducing the very teleological structure of evenness that it purports
to call into question.
We can gain a more detailed perspective on how the sociedad/formacion
conceptual juxtaposition works in Zavaletas late thought by turning to one
of the key historical scenes explored in Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia: the War
of the Pacific (18791883) that was waged between Chile and a Bolivia
Peru alliance, in which Chile triumphed decisively despite significant demo-
graphic and economic advantages held by its opponents. Following its disas-
trous defeat, Bolivia was forced to cede to Chile the mineral-rich region of
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the trick of being able to concentrate all of ones being into a single
instant reveals ones superiority, because all of the evidence concern-
ing Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific is that they were unable
to bring everything together in such a way. The concept of national
mobilization was foreign to those countries . . . (Zavaleta 1986: 58)
10
On the totalisation of time see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and
the Avant Garde (Osborne 1995). To illustrate this idea of temporal totalisation, Osborne
refers to Heideggers meditations on being toward death in Being and Time. For Hei-
degger, death is not synonymous with the end of biological life; rather, it names both
14 Patrick Dove
must begin by redressing the constitutive exclusions that are the colonial lega-
cies of the res publica and at the same time by taking into account the existence
of abigarramiento as a heterogeneity that precedes (and ruins) any possible uni-
fication of social totality. A political praxis that takes seriously what Zavaleta
has to say about abigarramiento would need to begin by abandoning the idea
that democracy could become synonymous with the overcoming of everything
that is motley and incongruous. As I suggested in my earlier comments about
the post-2006 MAS state and Garca Lineras approach to post-neoliberal dis-
sensus, however, it is far from clear that hegemony and abigarramiento may be
made compatible with one another, as many of Zavaletas readers would like it
to be.
The fact that Zavaletas use of the term abigarramiento does not give rise to
a theory is significant. Far from seeing this as a shortcoming, we should recog-
nise this as part of the books enduring interest. Abigarramiento haunts Zavale-
tas book as a limit for theorisation Marxian or otherwise and indeed for
any modern epistemology of the social. As I have already noted, the final
version of Lo nacional popular en Bolivia that we have inherited is that of a
still-unfinished project; but even then it seems questionable whether or not
Zavaleta anticipated that abigarramiento would eventually function as a
concept available to be put to work for radical politics. The role that this term
plays in Zavaletas late writing is similar to what I am proposing may be
done with the term desencuentro: it enacts a shift in register from the descrip-
tive, the empirical or the merely negative to something else. But what? This
other register cannot be that of ontology because neither abigarramiento nor
the possibility of anticipating such an end (a possibility which, for Heidegger, is proper
to the human and which therefore designates not just a biological end but also the end
of all human endeavors, desires, awareness and so on) and the impossibility of ever
relating directly to death qua event. Death, in other words, is the constitutive limit
of human Dasein for Heidegger. It is this notion of the constitutive limit that I am inter-
ested in bringing forth in the discussion of abigarramiento and desencuentro.
The Desencuentros of History 15
11
Infrapolitical critique starts on the notion that there is always an underside to
political thought that gets necessarily erased by all conventional understandings of
the political, and yet it is most fundamental. On the basis of a reading of Derridas
1964 seminar on Heidegger: The Question of History and Being (Derrida 2013), we may
be prepared to say that the infrapolitical dimension of all political thought, and of
every kind of political practice, is connected to the thematization of the so-called
ontico-ontological difference in the political region. In other words, we are prepared
to entertain the thought that an infrapolitical step back from politics is also necessarily
a step back from the ontotheological understanding of the political we have inherited
from the traditions of modernity (Moreiras 2014: n.p.).
16 Patrick Dove
12
The Republican State, whether it is conservative or liberal, protectionist or free-
trade, is essentially a system of trenches and traps set against indigenous society,
against the ayllus and the peasant communities. There is not even a semblance or simu-
lation of incorporating the indian, because what defines this State and the social
sectors that have united politically within it as governing power, is precisely a perma-
nent conspiracy against the indigenous multitude. (Garca Linera 2009a: 177)
13
On the social count and the appearance of the part that is not a part, see Ranciere
2004.
The Desencuentros of History 17
14
On the non-identity of time see Jacques Derrida, Ousia and Gramme (Derrida
1982) and, more recently, Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994, especially Ch. 4).
18 Patrick Dove
the national-popular revolution could be resignified after the fact in the early
1980s he was still thinking and writing from within the revolutions hegemo-
nic period it may be that we are now in a position to ask whether and to what
extent the national-popular revolution and its impact can be said to contribute
to, or at least open up conditions of possibility for, the popular uprisings of the
early 2000s. In other words, we can ask whether or not the anti-neoliberal
insurrections of Cochabamba, El Alto and La Paz could have happened had
it not been for an earlier event that posited the underlying existence of equality
among all Bolivians regardless of their social and ethnic statuses. The other
tendency, which we have already looked at in the discussion of Garca
Linera, attributes whatever happened in 19521953 anything of historical
substance to the combined agency of the Revolutionary Nationalist Party
(MNR) and the working class while categorising campesino groups as relatively
passive participants who allowed themselves to be interpellated by a working-
class project. The fundamental problem in both cases resides in the expla-
nations over-reliance on the concept of a political subject that would be the
cause capable of accounting for historical effects.
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15
As Jacques Derrida notes in Signature Event Context (Derrida 1988), a sign
cannot become a sign unless it carries with it the possibility of being understood dif-
ferently in another place or time, or by another interlocutor. There can be no communi-
cation, no event or speech act, unless I allow my original intention to be framed in a
recognizable, repeatable form. If repeatability is the condition of possibility for all
communication, because it is there at the origin of any sign, then there can be no
event that is not already haunted by repetition and by the possibility of being under-
stood differently.
The Desencuentros of History 19
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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