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Movement and Government
The Bolivian elections of December 18, 2005, which brought to power the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and its leader and presidential candidate Evo Morales, was the culmination of several years of increasing protest by a variety of social movements, and increasingly weak, ineffective government. In a race with three major candidates Morales become one of very few Bolivian presidential candidates to win a simple majority of the votes cast, and his party achieved a strong position in the national legislature. MAS' victory represented much more than just a change of government, however. Morales and his party offered a radical break with the neoliberal orthodoxy of government policies since the mid-1980s. They promised to "refound" the Bolivian Republic, opening the corridors of power to the disenfranchised, particularly the rural poor and indigenous people, and ending centuries of domination and exclusion of indigenous and working people. Morales and his supporters seem to have a clear understanding that their electoral victory is only one step in a longer term goal of transforming Bolivian government and society.
The roots of MAS go back to the union of coca-growers in the Chapare region of Bolivia (Las Seis Federaciones del Tropico de Cochabamba), and Morales maintained his position as president of that union even after he became President of Bolivia. Yet as Albro (2005) and Kohl and Farthing (2006) have pointed out, MAS managed to construct an activist coalition that included radical and populist groups with very different aims and methods. Notable among these were labor unions, the campesino union, or CSUTCB, the main elements of the "ayllu democracy" movement, notably the Aymara group CONAMAQ, other indigenous advocacy groups. Another important supporter early on was the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, the network that had taken over the Cochabamba water system in 2000 in what is now seen as the first major success of popular power in the current Bolivian social crisis. In the election, MAS also attracted the votes of large parts of the urban middle class.
Many have argued that the period of social and political crisis that culminated in MAS' rise to power represents the final collapse of the liberal/mestizo consensus that had underlain Bolivian national politics since the Revolution of 1952, and been intensified starting with the last Paz Estenssoro government of the 1980s (see for instance Albro 2006b). The sense that all of the contending elements of the established political scene had failed was without doubt a crucial ingredient in MAS' overwhelming electoral victory. Leaders of the new government seem to agree, and even claim that their movement will usher in a new pluriethnic model of Bolivian citizenship and a more inclusive democracy.
This paper is about this last possibility in particular, and some specific challenges that stand in the way of its realization. At the most general level, the questions I am asking are: what challenges arise when radical social movements such as MAS and its allies take power through elections? What is the relation of state power and the power of social movements? How can the nature of state power advance and / or impede the achievement of movement goals? These questions, while particularly crucial in Bolivia given the nature of the movements that stand behind the current government, are also important for understanding the political possibilities of a number of new left-wing governments in South America.
My concern in this paper, then, is not with the changes in the lives of Bolivians that the MAS government is or is not bringing about, or with the political-economic question of what amount of social reform will be tolerated by conservative forces inside and outside of the country, or even the threat of secession by the rich lowland departments. I am investigating, rather, a procedural issue: many of the social movements that made MAS' victory possible both practice and advocate forms of consultative democracy that are not compatible with the structure of power in a state, such as Bolivia's, whose ideal structure is liberal-democratic. How, if at all, are those practices and aspirations realized when the social movements have achieved state power? In considering this issue, the Marxist and anarchists idea of "dual power," coined to describe potentially revolutionary situations in which sovereignty is divided between contending classes, will be helpful.
The Mundane Life of Government
One of the major challenges to a social movement that takes state power is that the nature of state power imposes specific limits and opportunities on the action that a government or its members can take. This I call the mundane life of government: the actual conditions under which those operating state power act. When we think of the mundane, usually we think of action by people without much power, or at least by those who are not exercising much power at the time. The term is most often employed to evoke the very opposite of the heroic, the history-making; it is people operating at the level of themselves. It is useful, though, to recognize that like grocers, miners and secretaries, those who run governments have mundane existences, not just in their private lives, but in their existence as ministers, parliamentary representatives and so on. This is not just the equivalent of the fact that government is one of the conditions of mundane life for everyone else. Rather, for those who exercise governmental power, day-to-day action is quite distinctive, and is always tinged by the possibilities and commitments imposed by that power.
The Bolivian Constitution, for instance, lays out specific possibilities and constraints for action by members of the government (and, perhaps most significantly, disallows other constraints). For instance, executive power lies in the person of the President, without regard to the social conjuncture that got him into power; he has specific power of decree, commanding the army, appointing sundry officials and so on, none of which are officially constrained by his extra-governmental allies, or indeed, by any aspect of how he achieved the position of President. Parliamentary representatives, by the same token, are elected to represent, in principle, an undifferentiated segment of the national population defined by residence. They do not represent social movements, classes, or specific communities. The expectations informally (but almost inevitably) invested in a President make it easier for him to achieve an end by the direct exercise of state power (or at least to be seen to do so), rather than through the charisma and arts of persuasion that are so crucial to a social-movement leader.
For the purposes of this paper, the most important fact about the mundane life of government is that in a representative system such as Bolivia's (and most democratic governments), popular sovereignty is formally limited to the moment of selection of leaders; once they are selected they draw their power, not from their constituents or even from the social movements that backed them, but from the apparatus of the state. These is one of the reasons that some radical theorists have argued that liberatory social change can never be achieved through the action of governments (e.g., Biehl and Bookchin 1998) Exercising state power, according to this position, necessarily constrains one to act in undemocratic and oppressive ways.
The MAS government claims to be bringing about a fundamentally different kind of government than those before it, and to offer a fundamentally new relationship between government and citizens. Much of MAS' success prior to the election came as a result of the party's ability, first to represent a social movement of coca-growers and then to move beyond their base, to articulate the demands and visions of many different popular movements, including multiple indigenous movements, rural peasant movements, the workers movement and urban residents' groups. They were able to forge this alliance in part through the intensive use of consultative assemblies, a technique for allowing the political base to maintain a direct relationship with their leaders that had been pioneered by the residents' groups in Cochabamba and El Alto (see Albro 2005, 2006a; Lazar 2006; Dangl 2007). This aspiration for the party to be transparent to the aims of a mobilized populace can be seen in the modifier that is consistently paired with the party's name: Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. (1) As one intellectual from MAS put it: "MAS is not a party, but a political instrument that is born from social mobilizations. That is where its power lies ..." (2) (Chavez 2002). The government claims to be continuing some version of this consultative practice in government, witness Morales' inauguration speech, in which he identified the party with the various movements that came together in it (Morales 2006b), or his speech at the archaeological site of Tiwanaku the day before his inauguration in which he called on the indigenous leaders and organizations of Bolivia to "push" him and "correct" him if he makes mistakes in advancing the struggle for liberation (Morales 2006a). The way he filled his cabinet with representatives of various allied social organizations is also a sign of this commitment. The current vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, perhaps most clearly articulated this political position when he described "Evo-ism" as "a project of self-representation of the social movements, of plebeian society" (Garcia Linera et al. 2006). (3) He makes a similar point in his discussion of the importance of "the multitude" as...
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