Democracy in The Andes Alvaro Garcia Lin

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Democracy in Latin America: lvaro

Garca Linera, an Introduction
Alberto Moreiras
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Democracy in Latin America: Alvaro Garca Linera, an

Introduction
Alberto Moreiras
When the final veil is removed there is no solid body underneath.

(Millington 1995: 36)
I.
The journal editors invited me, some time ago, to put together a special issue
one of whose functions would be to celebrate the work done by Mark
I. Millington through his many years of service to the journal and the pro-
fessional field in general. Through their invitation, I suppose, they were high-
lighting, intentionally or not, an exchange that took place in 1995 between
Millington and me on the subject of what we were then calling location,
that is, on the burden situational consciousness (or unconsciousness, as the
case may be) imposes on critics, and particularly on critics in the Western
academy when they broach Latin American issues. As it happened, at the
time of the editors approach I was starting to prepare a workshop, to be
held at Texas A&M University in November 2013, on the work of Alvaro
Garca Linera, the brilliant intellectual and political activist that had been
appointed Vice President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia shortly after
the electoral victory of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in December 2005,
and who has held the job ever since. So I proposed to the editors a special
issue on the work of Garca Linera, where, presumably, a number of the con-
cerns and issues raised by Millingtons (1995) essay On Locations: The Ques-
tion of Reading Crossculturally would be revisited. It is a pleasure to
introduce this issue, then, specifically as an homage to and a celebration of
Mark I. Millingtons thoughtful care for and lifelong concern with critical
self-reflexivity as a scholar of Latin American literatures and cultures.1
Our interest, even fascination, regarding Garca Lineras production
responded first of all to our perceived need to establish a relation, perhaps
1
I want to thank Jaime Rodrguez Matos for his careful reading of a draft version
of this essay. I also want to express my regret that a number of workshop participants
(Democracy in the Andes: The Work of Alvaro Garca Linera, Texas A&M Hispanic
Studies Workshop, November 2013) did not send their contributions in finished form
after our very lively discussions, hence they are not published here.
# 2015 Taylor & Francis

2 Alberto Moreiras
as Latin Americanists in the Western academy, not just with Garca Linera, in
and through his work, but also with the Bolivian revolutionary process itself.
The self-reflexivity Millington has constantly pushed as an ethical obligation
in the field, however, forces us to note now that it would be nave or worse
on our parts to pretend our efforts, as outsiders, can pass effective critical judg-
ment in any strong sense on the Bolivian situation as such. It is not the inten-
tion of the present collection of essays to offer anything like an overall
evaluation of the role of Garca Linera in the political administration of
Bolivia after the revolutionary turmoil that took place in 20002005, much
less to critique the fate and accomplishments of the on-going Bolivian
process as a whole. All of us celebrate, and have celebrated, the victory of
MAS and the degree of indigenous empowerment it has facilitated; all of us
celebrate the Bolivian popular uprising against neoliberalism and the disgra-
ceful Bolivian neoliberal regime that antedated the revolutionary process for
many years; all of us hope that the political process in progress now can
deepen and even radicalise the already obvious democratic and anti-colonial
accomplishments of the last ten years. But we do not think it is our function or
responsibility either to celebrate uncritically or to denigrate unadvisedly a
work and a political and social process (and both are by now mutually imbri-
cated) whose complexity and difficulties are vast and clearly discernible as
such. The premise of the workshop where these essays were first presented
was to read Garca Lineras work in the context of his position at the heart
of the Bolivian state, and that is what we do. We focus on critical problems
whose ultimate importance for the Bolivian political process will have to be
seen.
At the same time, my disclaimer should not be taken as an abandonment
of critical responsibility. The contributors to this issue are scholars that have
made it their task to spend their lives studying and thinking about any
number of Latin American cultural and political processes. Even though
they are not deep experts in the Bolivian conjuncture (one of them is indeed
a Bolivianist, although at a very early stage of his career), they care intensely
about it, and have made it their business to speak on some aspects of it. We
offer the results for critical discussion and exchange, without undue arro-
gance, not thinking we know better than everybody else, but at the same
time with the kind of earnestness that Alvaro Garca Linera himself calls for
when he refers to the fact that
a serious critique of a political project cannot be done with lies,

because the only thing that comes out of that is a political farce that
would be similar and now clearly joined to the critiques of the reac-
tionary right in the country. (Garca Linera n.d.: 60)2
How do we, then, avoid the lie? Reading is necessarily perspectival, and our
own positions inform our readings. It is probably fair to say that most if not
all of the contributors to the issue place themselves on a side of the political
divide that questions both the tendency of the Bolivian process towards a
2
The translation of this (and all subsequent quotations) is that of the author.
Democracy in Latin America 3
full national-popular reconfiguration and the knee-jerk appeal to victorious

hegemonic rule based on the production, sustainment and naturalisation of
particularist if mostly anti-colonial identity claims tied together in an
alleged chain of equivalence. They do so because they do not think national-
popular hegemony formations, even if presented flexibly as a government
of social movements (Garca Linera 2014: 49) or as based on some kind of
reconceptualisation of the Leninist doctrine of dual power, specifically
further in the long run what is to be understood as democratic process,
which we support. Rather, they contain democratic process.
Hegemony theory in general, certainly in Laclau and Mouffes sense, has
proven to be an extremely adequate tool to articulate political projects in con-
temporary times, but it cannot be a final tool nothing can. As Garca Linera
himself has said, it has concretely enabled a new left that is neither instrumen-
talist nor abdicationist, a left not based on the absolute priority of the party
and the partys doctrine, but also a left that understands that there is no pol-
itical success that does not go through actually taking power:
The enlightened vanguard of the instrumental left is today substi-

tuted by the spiritual vanguard of the abdicationist left. In both
cases, the motor of the revolution is not constituted by the subaltern
classes, either through ignorance or impurity, but by a few that will
have to restaurate a pure world: the monopoly of the elected; that
is, curiously, a new State. But now one without the illusions and
impurities of the plebs. (Garca Linera 2015: 49)3
We are with Laclau for the most part, and we want neither instrumentalism
nor abdicationism, but we are wary of the tendential traps of hegemony for-
mation as we believe them potentially, and eventually, capable of turning
hegemonic leadership into a new form of subaltern control and domination,
particularly when it comes to social dissidence. We could say that these
essays attempt to enable a political critique of the day after, that is, while
fully endorsing the Bolivian revolutionary process, and other global move-
ments, against the neoliberal regime of rule, they want to analyse and critique
the concrete strategies through which Garca Linera justifies certain political
measures against their alternatives; and the concrete modes of articulation
of what is political and of how to understand the social against their alterna-
tives. If the ultimate political scheme in Garca Lineras work could be sum-
marised as hegemony plus community, where the formation of proper
community is postponed sine die or given the form of an infinitely receding
communist horizon, there are other ways of conceptualising democratic politi-
cal process. Our essays want to keep those paths open.
At the heart of Jeffery Webbers subtle critique of George Ciccariello-
Mahers We Created Chavez, Webber says that, contrary to what happened in
3
The reader may consult Garca Lineras book to see who the target is of the abdi-
cationist critique. My point is that our position is neither instrumental nor abdication-
ist, even if it does not subscribe to the literalness of either Laclaus or Garca Lineras
position.
4 Alberto Moreiras
Venezuela, where a revolutionary epoch has not taken place, Bolivia did
undergo a revolutionary process between 2000 and 2005:
It is plausible to contend that Venezuela has not even entered a revo-

lutionary epoch at any time since 1989, much less achieved a political
or social revolution; instead, Venezuela has witnessed a series of
rebellions from below with wide-scale popular participation, and
other actions from above with lesser popular participation, which
have forced significant concessions from factions of the ruling class,
produced significant changes in the personnel of state management,
led to the transformation of some old political organizations as well
as the creation of new ones, and allowed for major social improve-
ments through the distribution of a greater share of the oil-rent to

the popular classes in a context of high oil prices on the world
market. By comparison, the left-indigenous insurrectionary process
that unfolded in Bolivia in 20005 arguably constituted a genuine
revolutionary epoch which overthrew two heads of state through
mass mobilization. This surge from below has been partially con-
tained by the government of Evo Morales, and has thus far looked
therefore like a political revolution emerging as a consequence of an
aborted social revolution. (Webber 2015: 200)
The essays that follow engage in the discussion concerning both political
results (as it is, a version of Bolivian accomplishments could be given
closely following Webbers list for Venezuela) and revolutionary containment,
not wanting to pontificate on the future or even the recent past, but making it
clear there are significant segments of political action, including theoretical
production, that are in need of critique or clearly available for disagreement
even from a sympathetic perspective. It may be adequately self-reflexive to
state outright that our contributors do consider it a lie for the most part to
take recourse to hegemony formation in lieu of democratic process, as its
furthering rather than its containment. They would also consider it a lie, for
the most part, to claim that identity-vindication, or even identity-constitution,
have anything to do with political liberation proper. Those may be, at bottom,
the positions, not always explicit, that unify the essays brought together in this
volume, and which, by themselves, put this collection at some distance from
the mainstream of theoretico-political reflection on contemporary political
processes in Latin America, and not only by Latin Americanists.
Before summarising some of the concrete critical accomplishments of the
essays in this volume, let me return to the issue of critical location underlined
by Mark Millington in his 1995 essay. There is, we would think, a way in which
an excessive emphasis on location is paralysing and counterproductive there
is even a way in which an excessive emphasis on location, as fundamental
ground of critique, could be associated with a dominant strand of Western-
academic ideology in the last 30 years or so. As the contributors to this
volume are not or would not consider themselves to be purely locationalist
thinkers, I will attempt a cursory reading of some essays recently published
in the website of the Bolivian Vice Presidency where an internationalist
extrapolation of the Bolivian experience is attempted. I shall do it as an effort

to give some teeth to our critical modesty.
II.
Scepticism about location (in various senses) is required, says Millington
(1995: 24). The various senses refer to the fact that the scholar should be
wary of his or her own situation in order to reject insidious prejudice as
much as possible, but also that there is a limit to the work an acute locationalist
thought can carry out. Radical locationalism is rather undistinguishable from
dogmatic fundamentalism, as it takes its point of departure in the assumption,
or rather, the assertion, that there cannot be but a thorough identification
between place and self-awareness, between place and knowledge, and that
only those without distance can approach the position of the subject supposed
to know. Knowledge awareness of the world is here equivalent to iden-
tity; one properly knows only that which one always already is. That this pos-
ition has come to be rather entrenched in many critical discourses in and about
Bolivia (and Latin America in general) that it has come to form a constituent
if not exclusive part of what goes under the name of anti-colonial ideology
does not make it any less mistaken in my view, which is not to say its diametri-
cal opposite (there is no strictly local knowledge, there is no strictly local exist-
ence) is at the limit any more certain. The key here is to consider the fact that
local knowledges and, a fortiori, their anti-colonial deployments are not
identitarian in nature, that is, that they do not primarily depend on cultural
identification and may have nothing to do with it. Millington quotes some
well-known lines by Gayatri Spivak:
What is known is always in excess . . . Knowledge is never adequate to

its object. The theoretical model of the ideal knower in the embattled
position we are discussing is that of the person identical with her pre-
dicament. This is actually the figure of the impossibility and non-
necessity of knowledge. (Millington 1995: 23)
But any anti-colonial claim based on the impossibility and non-necessity of

knowledge, which is what all radical endotopies endorse, is both empty and
blind.
There are political consequences to this, and they have not always been
drawn. One of them is that identitarian thought is always for the most part
embattled, as Spivak says, by what Millington terms pious political attitudi-
nizing (1995: 22), so typical of many so-called First World critics of Third
World texts (1995: 21), but also of many self-proclaimed identitarians. That
this issue is highly relevant in a context characterised by what Webber refers
to as the left-indigenous insurrectionary process goes without saying. That
endotopy, or identity as a byproduct of locationalism may be politically
negative from the point of view of democratic process must, however, be
underlined in order not to lose sight of the fact that identity, as necessarily par-
ticularist, as the very ideology of particularism, necessarily imposes con-
straints that can only be coopted but never functionalised by democratic
political power.
6 Alberto Moreiras
The solution is not, I think, provided by Garca Lineras recent elabor-

ations of the identity theme in the Bolivian process, which do rather sound
as elaborations for cooptation. Identidad boliviana. Nacion, mestizaje y plurinacio-
nalidad [Bolivian Identity: Nation, Mestizaje, and Plurinationality] (2014) must
perhaps be read as a conjunctural political act, not unlike, in that respect, every
book in a certain sequence published by Garca Linera in recent years, includ-
ing El oenegismo, enfermedad infantil del derechismo [NGO-ism, Infantile Disease
of Rightism] (n.d.), Geopoltica de la Amazona. Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acu-
mulacion capitalista [Geopolitics of the Amazon. Land-Patrimonial Power and
Capitalist Accumulation] (2012) and, to a lesser extent, Socialismo comunitario.
Un horizonte de epoca [Communitarian Socialism. An Epochal Horizon] (2015).
Identidad boliviana is a powerful reaction to Carlos Mesa Gisberts La sirena y el
charango. Ensayo sobre el mestizaje [The Mermaid and the Charango. An Essay
on Mestizaje] (2013) a book to which Garca Linera devotes a very long criti-
cal footnote that is also a resounding defence of what Identidad will call the suc-
cessful and hegemonic Indianization of the Bolivian State against any
substantive notion of mestizaje (note 19, 5556). While I am in agreement
with Garca Linera that the old ideology of mestizaje reproduced by Mesa
Gisbert in order to support his own political project is long bankrupt,
leaving aside the factical law of the essential mestizaje of any given human
group, there are certain aspects of Garca Lineras ringing endorsement of
the radically identitarian constitution of the Bolivian nation-state (now an inte-
gral state, as opposed to the apparent state of previous formations) that I think
merit critical examination.4
A crucial moment arrives when Garca Linera expounds on the fact that
the very indigenous social organisations conjured away the possibility of
self-determining tendencies for the indigenous nations (2014: 53). The attribu-
tion of agency to the indigenous social organisations functions as a matter of
national common sense: It is well known that nations with a greater historical
vitality tend to lean towards the constitution of nation-states, as it has hap-
pened in various parts of the world (2014: 53). Indigenous organisations,
Garca Linera tells us, could well have chosen to go their own way and
declare themselves independent, but history went another way (2014: 53):
Constructions of cultural hegemony, of the articulatory skills of the

indigenous movements followed to say it in some way a path
more Gramscian than Leninist regarding the state consolidation of
indigenous identities; in such a way that, instead of opting for indi-
genous national self-determination (which would have meant the
separation from Bolivian identity), the struggles flowed towards the
option of the Indianization of the Bolivian State, and the growing
Indianization of Bolivian identity, as the site of unification of the
diverse indigenous and non-indigenous identities, in parallel to the
cultural re-strengthening of the very same indigenous identity.
(Garca Linera 2014: 53)
4
Compare Garca Linera, Del estado aparente al estado integral (2010).
A Gramscian model: identities add themselves through seamless articulation

(see Garca Lineras extraordinary phenomenology of identity in the first 25
pages of Identidad boliviana) in order to constitute a yet stronger identity con-
stellation; the strength of identity is itself presented as a political palliative
and a true accomplishment even if the final referent of identity is the non-iden-
tity of a newly invented object: the Bolivian plurinational state, nonexistent
before 2006 (or, properly speaking, 2009). This is no doubt a strong discourse
on identity not a proposal but an affirmation of the triumphant Indianisation
of the Bolivian state through the creation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
Whatever is Bolivian becomes real the moment the State indianizes itself
(Garca Linera 2014: 58), where Indianisation is to be defined identitarily.
But what does that mean?
The last paragraph of the book incorporates a sort of Freudian slip that
should give us some pause:
For societies with a national diversity in their midst, what differen-

tiates the deep history of their States vis-a-vis other States surround-
ing them is the way in which interior nations join, articulate and
subordinate themselves around the dominant and leading identity.
When dominant classes and identity ignore and homogenize the
other nations inside the State, mestizaje is ethnocide and the result is
a monocultural State facing the rest of the plurinational society. On
the other hand, if dominant classes and identity recognize those
other national identities and the latter inscribe their material practices
in the state ordering, then we are in front of an isomorphism between
State, society and territory characterizing plurinational States. And
that is Bolivia today. (Garca Linera 2014: 75)
The last lines state that the alleged isomorphism is still a function of recog-
nition by the dominant classes and identity, which first of all means indigen-
ous identity and indigenous classes are not yet dominant in the plurinational
state: or that they are made dominant through a recognition that is now close
to self-recognition. This is in any case a curious isomorphism based on recog-
nition by the dominant, as opposed to the isomorphism of equals. The point is
not to claim that the plurinational state has somehow managed to default on
its renderings, rather that any state formed on the (explicit) notion of cultural
hegemony hierarchises identities and cannot fail to subordinate some to
others. Isomorphism, understood as the isomorphism of identities, is
nothing but a hegemonic trap, or a matter of state rhetoric. One wonders
whether Indianisation is to have the same status or fate.
It may well be true as an outsider, and self-reflexively so, I am in no pos-
ition to adjudicate the more-than-superficial accuracy of the final claim below,
but I do not contest such self-certain statements, whose truth would be
nothing short of remarkable that
today, in the times of Evo Morales and the social movements, neither
whiteness of skin nor cultural whiteness concentrate privilege; on the
contrary, as demonstrated by the mechanisms of formation of new
prestige and new merits in the selection process of civil servants in
8 Alberto Moreiras
the Plurinational State, exhibiting indigenous belonging or the spon-

sorship of indigenous organizations are the most sought-after at the
moment of looking for office, from military commands to legal
court or parliamentary structures. This speaks in favor of a rapid
devaluation of the colonial ethnic capital and even of a certain India-
nization of the legitimate qualifications in the face of the State. (Garca
Linera 2014: 52)
Whiteness recedes. The claim (carefully made: something speaks in favor of

it) is then that indigenous identity as Indianisation has become or is
becoming hegemonic in the plurinational state, that is, more than just rhetori-
cally hegemonic: substantially hegemonic; that Indianisation is the truth of the
state as such. This is of course crucial to national-popular formation: the new

transcendent common sense (the fundamental conception of the leading and
organising world of society) is the one that irradiates from the peasant indi-
genous movement (Garca Linera 2014: 50). A political revolution would
have been accomplished, and it only remains to be seen whether a social revo-
lution a true change in political economy, a fundamental reversal of the
control of the means of production can follow suit or is already doing it.
But even if the social revolution has not yet taken hold, politically speaking
democracy proper may no longer be needed: it has already happened, at
least as majoritarian or popular democracy, identitarian democracy. And yet,
the fact that all of this is premised on the triumph of cultural identity claims
makes one hesitate.
For Garca Linera, the triumph of cultural identity as the Indianisation of
the plurinational state is the proper coming of the nation into its own. This is so
because identity is the point of departure of any self-awareness for any
human being . . . our affirmation in and towards the world (Garca Linera
2014: 9); a categorical affirmation of being in the world whose very contin-
gency defines the human: a human being is a permanent construction of iden-
tities and differences constitutive of its being (2014: 12). If identity is the basic
form of the human, then identitarian density and identitarian consistency
(Garca Linera 2014: 1516) are ontological features of a primordial identity
(2014: 16) that not only anchors but also defines the human as such. If the truth
of the human is primordial identity, then political truth needs to be identitar-
ian. The integral state of identity, the identitarian state is in fact, in that case,
the most accomplished state form, the pinnacle of its glory: [n]ational identity
moves therefore the deepest and most vital convictions of beings because it
delimitates spaces of transcendent territorial certainty, real or imaginary,
where [human beings] develop their life systems theirs, and those of their
vital environment (Garca Linera 2014: 19). The nation is, in other words, pri-
mordial hegemony (Garca Linera 2014: 25). From the primordial identity of
the human to the primordial hegemony of the state, is that the secret, and
the truth, of democratic politics as such? Is nationalism, and nationalist
closure, the ultimate configuration of the political?
The issue is no longer indigenousness, or even indigenous identity, but its
substantialisation into national identity. One would need to wonder what is to
be the destiny of the particular human being, provided there is any, that has
not fallen into that particular national primordiality, or that refuses to be
reified into it, whether indigenous or not. This is not a marginal question. Iden-
tity is always potentially totalitarian. Garca Linera is clear enough:
to identify oneself is a way of valorizing oneself and at the same time

even without desiring it of valorizing and devalorizing others.
Identities, to a greater or lesser degree, have an effect of permanent
hierachization and conflict in the social space. (Garca Linera 2014: 14)
National-popular Indianisation hierarchises, values and devalues, and defines

and reifies the human in terms of its plausible degree of identification with
national identity itself (in its hegemonic version, now presented as primor-
dial). One needs to wonder whether Garca Linera has veered towards
radical locationalism and pious political attitudinising, at least rhetorically

or politically speaking (since we know from his other work that he cannot
be considered merely an endotopic thinker). Garca Lineras discourse on
identity may have as a primary function a politically conjunctural one: the
suture of his governments national-popular project as the final horizon of
Bolivian political democracy. Every hegemony, we have always known,
wants to be eternal.
III.
The strong articulation of identity and hegemony creates problems that trans-
cend location and that transnational movements for democracy are attempting
to deal with in my opinion, not quite persuasively enough. Turning the
thought of location into locationalism is an illegitimate manoeuvre of political
thought, because it betrays that which it aims to uphold. One is indeed
whoever one is, wherever one is, and it is certainly the function of non-oppres-
sive, democratic politics to uphold and develop the conditions that can liberate
location into its own, so that people can proceed to live their lives and to fulfil
their existence, such as it is, even infrapolitically if not infrapolitically for the
most part, as they would prefer. Removing oppressive conditions such as
external or internal colonialism, racism, discrimination and hatred from the
social is an essential aspect of political democracy, and we cannot fail to cele-
brate the great accomplishments of the Bolivian revolutionary process and the
MAS governments in those respects. They are indeed historical accomplish-
ments. Location, in the inclusive sense of biographical, life location cultural
perspective, situational consciousness and every other aspect of what can be
hypostatised into identity is a factical, unrenounceable, constitutive con-
dition of the human. Respect for it, whatever it is, is an eminent political
demand but it constitutes a condition of democratic politics, and cannot
be hijacked into its final horizon. When one does so, one substitutes location-
alism for location, hence reifying what must rather be left alone in order to
flourish in freedom.
Any kind of hegemony premised on identity, albeit subaltern identity,
runs the infinite risk of turning democratic recognition into compulsion, no
matter how counterintentionally. Indeed, the last thing democratic politics
would want is the kind of organisation of the social whereby people must
assume enforced identities or reject unwelcome ones (compare the dangers
10 Alberto Moreiras
alluded to by Garca Linera that are involved in a situation where one must be
or appear indigenous in order to become a civil servant, in the same way one
had to be or appear sufficiently white in the past). The positing of identity as
the horizon of subaltern politics is far from moving towards the end of subal-
ternity it only co-opts its notion at the service of a given ideology of power.
As an indication of potential problems at the theoretical level, I shall
briefly refer to three essays published by the Vice Presidency of the Plurina-
tional State of Bolivia in September 2014, that is, shortly after the irruption
of Podemos in Spanish and European politics. The publication takes the
essays from a previously published book that includes other contributions,
but keeps the title of the original book, Bolivia en movimiento. The authors
are, respectively, Pablo Iglesias Turrion, Jesus Espasandn Lopez and Inigo
Errejon. And the introductory note, signed by the Vicepresidencia, that is,
by Garca Linera himself, says:
The texts that follow are the product of research developed by Pablo
Iglesias and Inigo Errejon in our country some years ago, and today
they gain another sense as we read them in times when a change of
epoch germinates in Spain at the hands of these very same comrades.
(Iglesias 2014a: 5)
All three of the essays accept what I would consider a basic Laclauian scheme
very explicitly so Errejons and sponsor hegemony theory as the ultimate
instrument of political access for countersystemic agents. All three of them
base their concrete affective politics on identitarian terms, and promote a
national-popular political constitution. To the extent that Errejons essay
simply adapts, very competently, the Laclauian schematics to the Bolivian
process (with a twist: Errejon assimilates the production of hegemony to
Carl Schmitts notion that power means, first of all, to have the possibility
of determining whether a man is good or bad (Errejon 2014: 85), which,
thus put, brings back up the question of what is to be done with those who
refuse to comply with the definition of goodness provided by any given
national-popular hegemony: are they merely to be thrown aside at best,
crushed by power at worst? Or re-educated first?), I shall concentrate my
reading on the essays by Iglesias and Espasandn.
Iglesias minces no words. For him, the project is to create a grammar of
global resistance through indianizing the radical European left (2014b: 11).
In the wake of Garca Lineras Indianisation of the Bolivian state, the Indiani-
sation of the European left is essential to a global anti-capitalist (or anti-neolib-
eral) grammar based on a trans-zonal political cooperation (Iglesias 2014b:
10). At stake is the link between new movements in the periphery and
new invisibilized subjectivities in the central countries (Iglesias 2014b: 11).
The political project is therefore from the start, or initially, a project based on
identity recognition, which is modulated as the visibilisation of subjectivities
by Iglesias. This responds to a blindness of traditional Marxist class analysis,
historically unable to come to terms with antagonistic identities not defined by
their insertion in the trinity of subalternity: proletariat-peasants-lumpen
(Iglesias 2014b: 12). It is now no longer a matter of accepting indigeneity as
a legitimate subject of insurgency, rather of Indianising the global left. But

what can that mean?
First of all, it is said to be a political necessity from a strategic point of
view. The mobilising potential of class, Iglesias says, is today disappointing
(Flexible accumulation . . . has meant a general weakening of the power of
class organisations and a precarious redefinition of subalternity, whose
forms, in some areas of the periphery, have taken on ethnic contours
(2014b: 19)). Identity is the new class: the apparatus of social and political
struggle is generally articulated on the plane of identities . . . although difficult
to handle and always available to manipulation in a conservative direction
(Iglesias 2014b: 17). Subaltern identities represent the condition of possibility
of social transformation in an emancipatory direction (Iglesias 2014b: 17).
Hence the crucial role of Bolivia as an example of antisystemic struggle.

Global Indianisation first of all means the conformation of emancipatory poli-
tics along subaltern, identitarian lines.
But a little distortion comes into the picture:
Indigenous hegemony was not in itself a sufficient condition for the

assault on republican institutions and the best proof of it is the
failure of Felipe Quispes MIP and the success of Evo Morales
MAS, which knew how to articulate a collective project of different
Bolivian social movements and to generate an alliance with sectors
of the middle classes that was key to carry out a process of economic
reform in the country. (Iglesias 2014b: 20 21)
The notion of grammar comes into necessary play in order to tie up or

mutually link figures of class that [may] occupy the space of political antag-
onism (Iglesias 2014b: 23) strategically. In other words, ethnic identity, as
strong identity, is the glue that can establish the lateral possibility of antisyste-
mic alliances, which in themselves will overcome the impasse that has become
obvious for the radical autonomous European left: to want and not to be
capable (Iglesias 2014b: 23). Global Indianisation is then also the very possi-
bility of an identitarian position that functions as the empty signifier or the
point de capiton for a chain of equivalences, in Laclaus terminology. But
this means that identity no longer embodies any real content, it has become
a trope whose function is strictly political and whose referent is absolutely
contingent to political power.
Global Indianisation assumes here a metonymic or synecdochal role that
displaces the question of identity towards the question of an alliance between
different dangerous classes or subjectivities (women, unemployed individ-
uals, LGBTQ individuals, migrants, domestics and so forth) (Iglesias 2014b:
25). Indianisation comes to mean the very possibility of an actual hegemonic
articulation based on subaltern identitarian chains, where, however, the
concept of identity, now grammarised, formalised and emptied out, comes to
mean simply subjective antisystemic positioning in view of a perceived funda-
mental antagonism. This moves us far from Garca Lineras notion that Indiani-
sation means the becoming-real of Bolivia (Whatever is Bolivian becomes real
the moment the State indianizes itself). For Iglesias, we could say, whatever is
antisystemic becomes able to bid for power the moment the people collectively
12 Alberto Moreiras
move through identitarian metonymic links for or in view of a great synecdo-

chal configuration. Iglesias still needs or lacks, however, the synecdoche: a sub-
stantive identification that can occupy the position of the empty signifier, that
can occupy the whole as a part, necessarily subordinating other parts. Global
Indianisation has therefore come to mean the desire for an absent global
empty signifier capable of establishing hegemony through the generation of
strategic alliances and capable of taking power and of cancelling out neoliberal
hegemony. But locational positions identities can precisely not provide it,
and voluntaristic cathexes in solidarity will hardly do the job either.
Espasandn elaborates on Iglesiass themes but wants to take more time
evaluating the quintessential identitarian-endotopic position as exemplified
by the so-called decolonial option. This is only consistent, as it points to a
real problem. The problem rightfully is that, if we are to take the decolonial
position literally, then we must abandon any possibility of an emancipatory
global grammar on the basis of the desire for trans-zonal political cooperation.
Decoloniality, as it goes, is radical particularism, radical locationalism and
admits of no exotopic articulation (of course it is always possible to find
ways of opening up radical particularism to conversation, but radical particu-
larism is by definition the refusal of dialogics). For the decolonials, the decolo-
nial turn is a delinking from global politics to the very same extent it is also a
delinking, allegedly, from the epistemics of modernity. Is antisystemic struggle
possible, however, without the possibility of transversal and trans-zonal global
alliances? And is decolonial delinking not precisely the taking of every possible
exception to alliances in favour of a radically conservative thinking of filiation?
Espasandns answers are not immediately obvious. He elaborates on the rela-
tive blindness of Marxist class analysis through most of the twentieth century
and argues that it caused a blocked dialogical space premised on the fact that
indigenous communities could not enter the space of revolutionary subjectiv-
ity (2014: 59, 56). But things are different now, and well-meaning global leftists
must counter the radicalism of the notion that there is no liberation without a
total refusal of European thought through, yes, the Indianisation of the left
(Espasandn Lopez 2014: 60).
There is, however, a certain notable emptiness in Espasandns hospitable
gesture of accommodation. Indianization ostensibly means the welcoming of
anti-colonial positions in the contemporary global left, since it is necessary
to work with all of them, and the more radical elements of the decolonial
option would not want to join in the work without the others opening them-
selves to a new genealogy of thought (Espasandn Lopez 2014: 62). Yes, pro-
vided they accept the alliance, they can say whatever they want, and we shall
take it at face value as we cannot measure its truth, Espasandn seems to be
saying or is effectively saying. The unblocking of the space of dialogue must
happen, but it has not really happened yet, as we seem to have no content
for it. The call for a maximum degree of assimilation and real interiorization
of the anti-colonial struggle (Espasandn Lopez 2014: 69) has so far failed to
materialise in any thoughts other than the thought of the necessity of both
advancing beyond a politico-cultural neo-panindianism (2014: 64) and of
the necessity of embracing extra muros . . . new antisystemic social actors
and subjects (2014: n. 41, 63). Obviously not Espasandns fault: it is a struc-
tural necessity. A radical thought of location, turned into locationalism,
must be pre-empted by and for any project of political articulation: with that,
location is left behind, and identity is left behind in its properly infrapolitical,
existential function.
The neozapatista lesson and the resounding success of the Bolivian
process have in other words made it imperative for the transnational left to
incorporate anti-colonial positions and fight off cultural prejudice. This is
good, but there is a leap from there to any substantial Indianisation of the
left, that is, any Indianisation of the left which is effectively more than just
the recognition that actors and agents must be welcome into the political
struggle with their own locational dissidence and exception to, precisely,
whatever happens to be hegemonic, or whatever can be effectively articulated
into the hegemonic project. Which seems to organise a little aporia, or at least a
contradiction, at the heart of this project: identity, politically upheld, is

immediately politically betrayed.
Garca Linera affirms the ongoing Indianisation of the Bolivian state as a
matter of accomplished full national-popular hegemony, while Iglesias and
Espasandn and Errejon call for the Indianisation of the global left on the
basis of the Bolivian success. It is all very well that the global left is now
willing to incorporate extramural actors and agents into their purview for
strategic reasons. At the same time, it is clear that Bolivian conditions
cannot be replicated or mimetised elsewhere, nor would it be necessarily
desirable. There is no great primordiality of identity waiting around the
corner for the global left to embrace, because the world is not a nation and
can never be. It is also unclear whether the national-popular configuration
of Bolivian indigenousness, which structurally co-opts it at the service of a
nationalist cause, will last more than the MAS government, or even the
present moment of the MAS government.
The incorporation of indigenous identity claims for the sake of a trans-
zonal network of subaltern alliances will not organise identitarian hegemony
worldwide. Rather, those claims can only be incorporated, without betrayal,
posthegemonically, through their very difference and dissidence, through
their radical claim for non-manipulative respect. At one point in his essay, Espa-
sandn says that old Marxism could only consider indigeneity as a dependent
bureaucratic class, ossified in the bourgeois-democratic conquest of the land
(2014: 56). Otherwise their demands, Espasandn says, were necessarily prepo-
litical or infrapolitical (2014: 56). But the latter need not be a bad thing. Perhaps
what needs to be done is not to Indianise the left, but to posthegemonise
identity and liberate it from its national or even international horizon, and to
infrapoliticise it and liberate it from politics itself. Would this not be the true
left-indigenous demand, as it would be true for any identitarian demand not
ready to move into compulsion? Whatever you do politically, let me be,
which for the most part means: keep who I am out of it, do not use me so
that you do not abuse me. In any case, it seems to me the way to make the
demand viable and open to democratic process as opposed to its co-optation.
IV.
There remains for me the pleasant task of offering brief summaries of the
essays that follow. All of them focus on some real or perceived contradiction
14 Alberto Moreiras
in the Bolivian proceso de cambio while understanding that there will not be a
contradiction-free space anywhere in the political realm. The basic tension
between Indianist insurrection and its alleged taming at the hands of the
national-popular project represented by MAS is one of them, perhaps the
primary one from which others develop. But, given the fact that this is primar-
ily an issue on Garca Lineras work, the tension is consistently explored
through a critique, not of Indianismo itself (to be clear: indigenous voices
have been heard in Bolivia in recent years, loud and clear, speaking their
own political desire, and Indianismo is not their only word, although that
does not diminish its importance), its accomplishments and missed opportu-
nities, its pieties and hard-won truths it is rather explored through Garca
Lineras work, as both a theoretician of the political and a politician in an influ-
ential government position. The consequence is unintended: we have no indi-

genous perspectives represented in this issue, which means indigenous
perspectives are necessarily spectralised, imagined at best, invoked, but
never materialised. They are the other side, and also necessarily Garca
Lineras other side, that centres the study of critical tensions, but it is an
other side that remains silent or even absent, no matter how many signals it
may at the same time emit. It seems to me this absence of voice needs to be
noted and exposed. It is direct voice as well as quoted voice, represented
voice, which actually centres the issue as an absence everywhere, but also at
the moments when we see that the national popular hegemonic project can
only make the indigenous speak through the tenuousness of identity, as if
identity were the only thing the indigenous could and should say, as if identity
exhausted indigenous speech.
Peter Bakers essay, Can the State Learn to Live Well?, analyses the difficul-
ties attendant upon what Webber, as mentioned above, identified as the contain-
ment of the popular-indigenous revolution in favour of a state configuration
increasingly veering towards the national-popular. The 20002005 events,
when paired with the overwhelming electoral victory of MAS in the December
elections, created a double obligation, Baker says, in the face of two demands
that are mutually exclusive, and which sink into Bolivian history in various
ways: on the one hand, the demand for a complete replacement of the white-
mestizo order with an Indian civilisation, and on the other hand, the demand
for the stabilisation of a state-structure that could configure a national-popular
hegemonic order. Baker studies the fraught role of Garca Lineras theorizations,
which necessarily put him in the role of sovereign mediator and teacher of the
Bolivian people: the author reproduces a certain relationship between knowl-
edge production and the subaltern in his writings in which it is the role of the
intellectual to translate the needs of the underrepresented.
Gareth Williams, in Social Disjointedness and State-Form, taking his
departure in what Baker suggests might be the real point of bifurcation of
the Morales-Garca Linera government, namely, the conflict over the TIPNIS
road, analyses the complex Gramscian understanding of hegemony in the
context of Bolivian Gramscianism in particular: Rene Zavaleta Mercado,
Luis Antezana and Garca Linera. Williams shows that, as can be seen in Geo-
poltica de la Amazona, Garca Lineras writings are mobilised increasingly
against the problematic spectre of dual power, which in the historical sequence
of the last decade can only be a reference to the participatory democracy and
communitarian rebellions of radical Indianism in their local and/or regional,

but always fully ethnicised, assertions. National-popular hegemony in Bolivia
is increasingly a development of political reason that traverse[s] anomie (the
revolutionary experience of self-determination) in order to pass into nomos
(the measures of legislative consciousness), resulting on the way in mediated
subordination and consent. As a result, state hegemony over diversity gains
the upper hand, and the Bolivian process is no longer based on the hegemony
of diversity: state reason has been territorialised.
Doves essay, The Desencuentros of History, comments and elaborates on
the historical difficulties in the Latin American left, between Indianism and
Marxism, but also between Indianism and nationalist developmentalisms, that
are arguably at the basis of the dual-power problematics that centre the attention
of the previous two contributions. Zavaleta Mercado and Antezana are also
objects of attention, in particular Antezanas reinterpretation of Zavaleta Merca-
dos notion of formacion abigarrada, said to form the basis of a conceptual alterna-
tive to a traditional Marxian understanding of social relations. Zavaleta
Mercados conceptualisation would have been the beginning not just of the possi-
bility of a coming together of Indianista and Marxist critiques, but it also would
have set the ground for a rethinking of the nation as the indispensible ground for
contestatory, anti-capitalist politics, which Garca Linera will later centrally
endorse. Dove brings up the question of the final incompatibility, or desencuentro,
between abigarramiento and hegemony theory, which puts the former in the
terrain of infrapolitics. The category of desencuentro is then proposed as a non-
negatable limit of political negotiation in Bolivia, a permanent threat to hegemo-
nic suture, and therefore a historical condition of democratic practice.
The central concern in Maddalena Cerratos Nation Form, Community
Form is Garca Lineras shifting understanding of the nation at different
moments of his theoretical production, following upon Zavaleta Mercados vin-
dication of the nation form as the eminent political space. Garca Lineras sup-
plementation of the nation form with the community form is a necessary
part of the labour of thought and political practice forced by the historical evi-
dence of dual-power structures in Bolivia. Can the two be reconciled, and at
what cost? The reconciliation could become possible through the notion of abigar-
ramiento that Dove also commented upon no longer an obstacle, as in Zavaleta,
but, for Bolivia, the condition of possibility of a new national construction. It is to
be found along the lines of a community-nation the universal ayllu combining
the community form and the nation form. The Balibarian categories of fictive eth-
nicity and fictitious universality are invoked as tools in the construction of a
hegemonic nation, that is, a nation built around a hegemonic project as an ima-
gined community which, as imagined, may no longer respond to the concrete
communitarian realities it invokes in order to produce itself.
Jaime Rodrguez Matos The Mirror of Speculative Leftism takes issue
with the total calculability of politics Garca Lineras very pretensions regard-
ing the Bolivian plurinational state as hegemonic primordiality implies. Rodr-
guez Matos defends, contra Garca Linera, an aleatory materialism that turns
the incalculable into the fundamental cipher of history but to the extent
Garca Linera is todays triumphant Marxism, aleatory materialism can only
constitute Garca Lineras internal challenge, which some have tried to
dismiss either as speculative leftism or as mere reaction. Garca Linera,
16 Alberto Moreiras
along with all manner of Garca Linerists, becomes the representative and prin-
cipal upholder of a good history without omissions, fully fleshed out as real
community and harbinger of the, on the other hand, always receding commu-
nist horizon. This temporal gap, constitutive of Garca Lineras political project,
is sutured by the state itself, a certain imagining or doctrine of the state as a com-
munity-state: the state will be the ontological synthesis of Bolivia, its true
image, insofar as it alone can operate the efficient management of all the differ-
ent temporalities that accrue in a singular point. But this means: Just as the
state interiorizes the asynchrony of the pluri-national, so too must the commu-
nities become divided from inside in order to make way for the violence
inscribed in their becoming part of the hegemonic makeup of the state.
Brett Levinsons Expediency of Movimiento al Socialismo is a sustained
meditation, without conclusions, on the aporias of the Bolivian process. If

ideas without activism are empty, politics without intervention into judgment
is no politics at all, and certainly not just, but maintenance work, capitalism.
Intervening in judgment: changing thought. The claim that thought will
change itself once some basic redistribution of wealth has been orchestrated
seems to characterise some aspects of Garca Lineras ideas around indigenous
communities and indigenous organisations and institutions. But can the MAS
government really leave in the hands of a reconstituted or re-flourishing ayllu
the responsibility of the political constitution of Bolivia in view of a ceaselessly
receding communism? Is identity politics not always already that deferral? If
so, then the choice for identity politics as the maximum political expression of
the current regime may be simply a variation or a reconstitution of an old
game:
identity politics posits the oppressed in terms of the deprivation of its

subject: the ethnic subject is the possessor of privative, unacknow-
ledged properties, a private mind with private ways of knowing
and being of which he-she has been deprived, and to which he-she
must be restored. Identity politics is the revaluation of the devalua-
tion that it, like capitalism posits as ground, as essence and necessity
[for development].
Finally, Sam Steinbergs History and Survival in Alvaro Garca Linera

engages with Garca Lineras rhetoric and tropology of a communist
horizon as figure of the good, of the end of politics, of the end of war, of
full community, prefigured in the present, in a necessarily fallen manner, as
the mere projection of a communism of communisms where a thousand
flowers can come to join the one flower that will determine the futural accom-
plishment of a mankind that must now laboriously hope and struggle for the
right orientation (the just and also the correct one):
to produce communism as the Name, the master-metaphor, the sun, is

a return to all politics of the name, of the signifier, and thus to produce
precisely an accommodation with a set of uncomfortable facts, in
effect to decide that we cannot live, cannot produce the means of
our being-together, cannot survive the war to which we are
exposed, without a master (a master-metaphor).
In the end, it is the master who is in question, through the fascination of his
success, through the blinding light of his seductive appeal. But also, necess-
arily, in spite of it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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movimiento. Movimientos sociales, subalternidades, hegemonas. La Paz: Vicepresidencia

del Estado Plurinacional, 79 107.
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estructuras de exclusion y movimientos indgenas en Bolivia. In Pablo Iglesias
Turrion, Jesus Espasandn Lopez, and Inigo Errejon Galvan (eds), Bolivia en movi-
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Estado Plurinacional, 35 76.
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cion capitalista. La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional.
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reconduccion del Proceso de Cambio es la restauracion neoliberal). La Paz: Vicepresiden-
cia del Estado Plurinacional.
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Estado Plurinacional.
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grosas. La interfaz boliviana en la resistencia global al capitalismo. In Pablo Iglesias
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Estado Plurinacional, 9 34.
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Alberto Moreiras is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.

He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and
the University of Aberdeen. His book Piel de lobo: Ensayos de poshegemona
e infrapoltica is forthcoming in Biblioteca Nueva (Spain) and Marranismo
e inscripcion: Una entrevista y cinco apendices is forthcoming in La Cebra
(Argentina).

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Democracy in Latin America: Alvaro Garca Linera, an

When the final veil is removed there is no solid body underneath.

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

a serious critique of a political project cannot be done with lies,

full national-popular reconfiguration and the knee-jerk appeal to victorious

The enlightened vanguard of the instrumental left is today substi-

It is plausible to contend that Venezuela has not even entered a revo-

ments through the distribution of a greater share of the oil-rent to

extrapolation of the Bolivian experience is attempted. I shall do it as an effort

What is known is always in excess . . . Knowledge is never adequate to

But any anti-colonial claim based on the impossibility and non-necessity of

The solution is not, I think, provided by Garca Lineras recent elabor-

Constructions of cultural hegemony, of the articulatory skills of the

A Gramscian model: identities add themselves through seamless articulation

For societies with a national diversity in their midst, what differen-

the Plurinational State, exhibiting indigenous belonging or the spon-

Whiteness recedes. The claim (carefully made: something speaks in favor of

state as such. This is of course crucial to national-popular formation: the new

to identify oneself is a way of valorizing oneself and at the same time

National-popular Indianisation hierarchises, values and devalues, and defines

radical locationalism and pious political attitudinising, at least rhetorically

a legitimate subject of insurgency, rather of Indianising the global left. But

Hence the crucial role of Bolivia as an example of antisystemic struggle.

Indigenous hegemony was not in itself a sufficient condition for the

The notion of grammar comes into necessary play in order to tie up or

move through identitarian metonymic links for or in view of a great synecdo-

contradiction, at the heart of this project: identity, politically upheld, is

ential government position. The consequence is unintended: we have no indi-

communitarian rebellions of radical Indianism in their local and/or regional,

meditation, without conclusions, on the aporias of the Bolivian process. If

identity politics posits the oppressed in terms of the deprivation of its

Finally, Sam Steinbergs History and Survival in Alvaro Garca Linera

to produce communism as the Name, the master-metaphor, the sun, is

movimiento. Movimientos sociales, subalternidades, hegemonas. La Paz: Vicepresidencia

Alberto Moreiras is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.

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