The Desencuentros of History: Class and Ethnicity in Bolivia
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Date
2015
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Culture, Theory and Critique
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Abstract
In “Indianismo y marxismo: El desencuentro entre dos razones revolucionarias,” Alvaro García Linera takes up the theme of a repeated desencuentro in Bolivian history, a pattern of missed encounters or failures of understanding between projects vying for the social and/or political emancipation. While the essay title identifies these competing trends under two unifying headings—Marxism and indianismo—one can also construct a slightly different formulation of the problem: as a series of disagreements and missed opportunities for dialogue and collaboration between indigenous struggles for autonomy and/or full citizenship and decolonization on the one hand, and urban-centered modernizing and developmentalist projects of the Left including late 19th and early 20th century anarcho-syndicalism, a Marxist tradition that began to make serious inroads in Bolivia in the 1940s following the disastrous Chaco war (1932-35), and the national-popular revolution of 1952. Their ideological differences notwithstanding, all of the latter political tendencies viewed industrialization and proletariat struggle as the one and only path toward meaningful social transformation, while indigenous groups were seen as historically “delayed” forms whose “backwardness” was an obstacle to emancipation through modernization. The desencuentro emerges repeatedly through historical encounters between theories of political radicalism that are borrowed from European social and intellectual histories on the one hand, and social movements that claim to receive their conceptual orientation from Aymara and Quechua traditions on the other. The pattern of missed encounter comprises a fault line that runs alongside the social categories of class and ethnicity, and it poses significant challenges for Andean-based efforts either to articulate popular social categories as part of a larger chain of equivalencies or to separate them once and for all as simply distinct categories that have nothing in common. Desencuentro names an unthought at the heart of historical attempts to conceptualize social struggle in Bolivia.
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“The desencuentros of history: Indianismo and Marxism in Bolivia.” Culture, Theory and Critique 56:3 (2015): 313-32.
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