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ABSTRACT
The new economic flows ushered in across the South by the rise of China in particular have permitted some to circumvent the imperial debt trap, notably the ‘pink tide’ states of Latin America. These states, exploiting this window of opportunity, have sought to revisit developmentalism by means of ‘neo-extractivism’. The populist, but now increasingly authoritarian, regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador are exemplars of this trend and have swept to power on the back of anti-neoliberal sentiment. These populist regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador articulate a sub-hegemonic discourse of national developmentalism, whilst forging alliances with counter-hegemonic groups, united by a rhetoric of anti-imperialism, indigenous revival, and livelihood principles such as buen vivir. But this rhetorical ‘master frame’ hides the class divisions and real motivations underlying populism: that of favouring neo-extractivism, principally via sub-imperial capital, to fund the ‘compensatory state’, supporting small scale commercial farmers through reformism whilst largely neglecting the counter-hegemonic aims, and reproductive crisis, of the middle/lower peasantry, and lowland indigenous groups, and their calls for food sovereignty as radical social relational change. These tensions are reflected in the marked shift from populism to authoritarian populism, as neo-extractivism accelerates to fund ‘neo-developmentalism’ whilst simultaneously eroding the livelihoods of subaltern groups, generating intensified political unrest. This paper analyses this transition to authoritarian populism particularly from the perspective of the unresolved agrarian question and the demand by subaltern groups for a radical, or counter-hegemonic, approach to food sovereignty. It speculates whether neo-extractivism’s intensifying political and ecological contradictions can foment a resurgence of counter-hegemonic mobilization towards this end.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based in part on research undertaken by the author in June, July and August 2015 in Bolivia and Ecuador on the basis of semi-structured interviews conducted with a spectrum of stakeholders connected with agrarian dynamics and food sovereignty in the two states. Interviews were conducted with government departments and agencies, politicians/political parties, peasant/indigenous/farmer/landowner organizations, civil society organizations, and NGOs, whose help and support is gratefully acknowledged. It is also based on a wide-ranging and critical review of the literature related to the above and to the agrarian question, capitalism and state theory more generally, and on the author’s prior analytical work in agrarian politics in the global South and North. The research was made possible by CAWR’s (Coventry University) Innovation Fund and this support is gratefully acknowledged. An earlier version of this paper was presented as Conference Paper No. 34 at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative 2018 Conference, ISS, The Hague, Netherlands. The paper has benefitted greatly from the helpful comments of two anonymous referees.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The recent presidential election in Mexico suggests an exception to this trend.
2 Buen vivir and vivir bien are used as synonyms, although the former is used preferentially in Ecuador and the latter in Bolivia.
3 This approach stands in contrast to ‘populism’ in agrarian political theory, represented by McMichael (Citation2013) and van der Ploeg (Citation2008), with its elision of class amongst the ‘peasantry’, its radical under-theorization of the state, and its assumptions regarding the full trans-nationalization and unity of capital. It does concur with agrarian ‘populism’, however, in its concern for the ecological dimension and its advocacy of agroecology and food sovereignty, the latter on its ‘radical’ definition (Tilzey Citation2018a). It stands also in contrast to ‘orthodox’ Marxism, represented for example by Bernstein (Citation2010), with its class reductionism, its instrumentalist view of the state, its reification of developmentalism, and its failure to comprehend the profound importance of the ecological dimension.
4 In his treatment of imperialism, Marini saw peripheral super-exploitation of labour, and export-oriented capitalism as necessary to sustain industrial capitalism and high consumption in the centre. In his treatment of sub-imperialism, he saw dependent economies like Brazil seek to compensate for the drain of wealth to the imperium by developing their own exploitative (sub-imperial) relationships with even more peripheral neighbouring economies, such as Bolivia.
5 Offe and Lenhardt (Citation1976) articulated the twin structural problems of capitalism as: a) the driving imperative to uphold the process of accumulation, and b) the demands of social actors which need, to a certain degree, to be fulfilled in order to maintain legitimacy. This insight was later translated into Regulation Theory’s dual concepts of ‘regime of accumulation’ and ‘mode of regulation’.
6 Detailed data concerning land registration and title according to types of property (agrarian classes) are presented in Colque, Tinta, and Sanjines Citation2016.
7 One of the clearest political patterns to have emerged over the ‘progressive’ cycle is the bureaucratization of social movement actors through their entry into the bourgeois state apparatuses. Rather than transforming state institutions, the institutions have systematically transformed the movements. The problem of bureaucracy is not merely one of inherited structures of the ‘ancien regime’ or of the recalcitrance of ‘old order’ civil servants. Rather, it is a question of subaltern movement representatives themselves being transformed into impediments to change once received into the institutionality of the capitalist state. This bureaucratic layer of subaltern movement representatives begins to live off the state they are ostensibly intending to transform, such that their own material reproduction comes to depend on the preservation of the status quo (Thwaites Rey and Ouviña Citation2012; Zibechi Citation2016a; Webber Citation2017b).
8 Thus, for example, poverty in Bolivia between 2001 and 2012 decreased from 58.6% of the population to 44.9% (Colque, Urioste, and Eyzaguirre Citation2015).
9 Zibechi (Citation2016b) indicates that the problem with caudillismo is that it is a culture of the right, functional to those who want to substitute the protagonsim of those from below with those from above. It is a political and cultural operation of legitimation, at the cost of emptying out the content of collective actors. It is a conservative, elitist politics which reproduces oppression instead of superseding it.
10 In building consensual hegemony in this way, the Morales regime could, according to Akram-Lodhi (Citation2018) (after Hall [1985]), actually be described as ‘authoritarian populist’ in its first phase. The subsequent loss of consensual hegemony and slide into increased authoritarianism/violence could then be described in some ways as, in his terms, ‘right-wing populist nationalism’. This does not really explain, however, why populism in its first phase should be termed ‘authoritarian’ – hence we prefer to use the terms as defined by Scoones et al. (Citation2018).
11 See for example McKay (Citation2017) on the devastating ecological and health impacts of agro-extractivism in the Oriente.
12 This has been complemented by increased employment, often on large public infrastructure projects, with unemployment falling from over 10% in 2006 to under 5% in 2016, while poverty has decreased by 38% over the same period (Davalos and Albuja Citation2014; Henderson Citation2017; Peña Citation2017).
13 De la Torre (Citation2013) notes that the state is co-opting social movements and taming civil society whereby citizens are being turned into passive and grateful recipients of the leader’s benevolent and technocratically engineered policies. This is part of a clear trend towards caudillismo and authoritarianism. In contrast to Bolivia, however, it is not so much the case of social movement leadership being co-opted into the state apparatus but rather of the membership being politically beguiled by strategically targeted policies and welfare disbursements. The result has been to progressively divorce social movement leaders from their mass base in the case of organizations such as FENOCIN (see below), CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador), and Ecuarunari (Confederation of the Peoples of the Kichwa Nationality of Ecuador).
14 FENOCIN was founded as FENOC in the 1960s. Its roots lie in the Catholic Church’s attempts to draw support away from the Communist affiliated FEI (Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios). In the 1970s, FENOC broke with the church and assumed a more radical, socialist position. In the 1990s, after one name change, it assumed its current name to reflect the incorporation of indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities into its membership. FENOCIN, a member of La Via Campesina, emphasizes an interculturality that embraces Ecuador’s diversity and strives to unify all poor people into a struggle to improve their quality of life, democratize the country, and build a sustainable and equitable system of development (Becker Citation2012).
15 Indeed, a ‘regrouping’ of counter-hegemonic social movements was already apparent in 2012 with the Plurinational March for Life, Water, and Dignity from the southern province of Zamora Chinchipe to the capital Quito in protest against the opening of the Mirador copper mine, operated by the Chinese-owned company Ecuacorriente (Becker Citation2012).
16 This echoes Gudynas’ (Citation2018) call to go beyond modernism (capitalism) for both ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ reasons.
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Mark Tilzey
Dr Mark Tilzey is Associate Professor in the Governance of Food Systems for Resilience, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK. His research interests lie in political ecology, food regimes, agrarian change and agroecology, agri-environmental politics and governance, and the international political economy of agri-food systems. He is the author of Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, Resilience, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.