Between Pachakuti and Passive Revolution: The Search for Post‐colonial Sovereignty in Bolivia

Abstract

From the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose-up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re-founded Bolivia as a "pluri-national state," recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national-popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right-wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left-indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state-led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential). 1 | INTRODUCTION From the period 2000-2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose-up to contest the neoliberal model of dispossession. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2008; Webber, 2012a). This period of mobilisation *Chris Hesketh is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy in the School of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. † I would like to thank Adam Morton as well as three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Any errors remain my own. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Independent Social Research Foundation for supporting this research through a Political Economy Fellowship.

Indigenous resistance at the frontiers of accumulation: Challenging the coloniality of space in International Relations

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A Critical History of Poverty Finance

“…The political history of Bolivia in the latter half of the twentieth century can be usefully narrated as a series of truncated efforts to mitigate the contradictions inherent in these postcolonial patterns of uneven development -through what has been described, in Gramscian terms, as recurrent episodes of 'passive revolution' (Hesketh and Morton 2013;Hesketh 2020). The 1952 revolution, enabled in no small part by the weakening position of the tin mining families against the backdrop of US efforts to secure supplies during and after World War II (see Dunkerley 1984:12), initiated a partial process of transformation.…”