The plurinational state and Bolivia’s formación abigarrada

Abstract

This paper examines how the concept of plurinationality relates to the notion of Bolivia as a formación abigarrada (motley, disjointed social formation), and how that social form corresponds with the political form of the state. René Zavaleta Mercado, one of Bolivia’s most influential intellectual figures, is best known for his conceptualisation of the country as a formación abigarrada, which underscores the coexistence of multiple modes of production and historical temporalities in the same geographic space. Zavaleta used this concept to examine Bolivian society as a set of historical structural articulations that develop over time in relation to different state forms. I argue that whereas the disjointedness of Bolivia’s social formation was always seen as a negative condition for Zavaleta, plurinationality has been enunciated as a positive possibility, a horizon beyond the socio-political formation of the liberal nation state. Thus, while we cannot properly theorise plurinationality without the analytic of lo abigarrado, as a condition of possibility plurinationality seeks to institutionalise in political form that which for Zavaleta was a negative social condition to be overcome.

Keywords:

• Bolivia
• plurinationality
• the state
• motley
• René Zavaleta Mercado

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Postcolonial Studies (2019) 22: 3, 269–302; and Historical Materialism (2019) 27: 3, 77–135.

2 This idea of the state comes from one of Zavaleta’s most purely Marxist works. As Antezana (2009) has explained, Zavaleta’s thought can be organized into three defined periods, the first of which stretches from the late 1950s to the late 1960s where Zavaleta was primarily ‘nationalist’ and which is most clearly articulated in Bolivia: El desarrollo de lo concienca nacional (1967). The second period, where his work has been analysed as ‘orthodox Marxism’, culminated with the publication of El Poder Dual en América Latina in 1973/1974. The final decade of Zavaleta’s life is characterised as a period of ‘critical Marxism’ and is seen in Las Masas en Noviembre in 1983 and, posthumously, in 1986 with Lo nacional popular en Bolivia. However, while Zavaleta’s ideas and analyses certainly changed over the years, his theory of the state as a class unity of power over subordinate groups remained fairly stable despite the fact that he increasingly incorporated ideological and cultural aspects into his ideas on the relationship between state and society.

3 The Battle of Nanawa took place during the Chaco War (1932–1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay. According to Zavaleta, as a constitutive moment of crisis the Chaco War was ‘where Bolivia was to ask itself what it was made of’ and was ‘the point of departure for modern Bolivia’ (1986, 181).

4 While Zavaleta used the term ‘clase obrera’ (‘working class’), it was often applied somewhat ambivalently. Luis Antezana notes that Zavaleta ‘felt uncomfortable with the traditional concept of class to characterize the mining proletariat as a “working class” … finally replacing it with the concept of “the masses”’ (cited in Dunkerley, 205). Perhaps it is useful to think about Zavaleta’s employment of ‘clase obrera’ as similar to the way Étienne Balibar (2017, 54) ­describes Marx’s use of the term ‘proletariat’: ‘In reality, the concept of the proletariat is not so much that of a particular “class”, isolated from the whole of society, as of a non-class, the formation of which immediately precedes the dissolution of all classes and primes the revolutionary process. For this reason, when speaking of it, Marx employs, for preference, the term “Masse” (“mass” or “masses”), which he turns round against the contemptuous use made of it by bourgeois intellectuals in his day’.

5 The military–peasant pact was an agreement between various military rulers and rural peasant sectors of mutual support. It was seen as an essential arrangement that brought the military to power in 1964 and allowed it to maintain control until the early 1980s.

6 The Pacto de Unidad was an assembly of various social movement organisations that joined together in 2004 and was the central base of support for Evo Morales and the MAS in the 2005 elections. The central member organisations were the CSUTCB, the Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia – Bartolina Sisa (FNMCB-BS), the Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (CSCB), CIDOB and the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ).

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Aaron Augsburger

Aaron Augsburger is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies and Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida. He received a PhD in politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research has previously been published in Latin American Perspectives and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.