Latin America has a remarkable
history of contentious politics. In the past few decades, this has taken the
form of an upsurge of social movements, challenging neoliberal reforms and the
governments that would impose them. Examples of such movements include: the
cross-border movements and mobilisations against “free-trade” agreements, the
Zapatista movement in Mexico, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement in Brazil,
Afro-Colombians resisting displacement in a region coveted by investors, the piquetero
eruptions of workers and the urban poor in the wake of Argentina’s
financial crisis, and the indigenous mobilisations led by the Confederation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. Many students of the region affirm that
Latin America is home to some of the most powerful and successful movements in
the world, that it is the source of a new radical imaginary, making the imagination
of other worlds possible, and that it is leading the world in the struggle
against neoliberalism. name="_ftnref" title="">[1]

Within Latin America, Bolivian
social movements stand out as some of the most active and successful in the
region – indeed Bolivia may well be home to the most varied, effective,
and egalitarian grassroots organisations in the world.[2]
In terms of per capita income, Bolivia has the poorest population in South
America.[3]
In terms of culture, however, being home to the most indigenous population in
Latin America – a population that has successfully maintained and
reproduced its many indigenous cultures since the time of colonisation – it
is incredibly wealthy.

The years between 2000 and 2005, in
particular, saw a wave of successful protests. Between January and April 2000,
rural farmers, factory workers, students, and neighbourhood groups mobilised in
a prolonged series of protests, known as the Cochabamba ‘Water War’, to put an
end to a water privatisation scheme. name="_ftnref" title="">[4]
They managed to force the cancellation of a multinational corporations’
contract, the subsidiary of California based Bechtel, Aguas del Tunari, and the return of water management to public hands.<a
href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref" title="">[5]
By most accounts, the water war represents the great turning point in contemporary
Bolivian mobilisation, as it “ruptured years
of neoliberal hegemony and helped Bolivians make connections among a myriad of
issues, including the anti-imperialist struggles against coca-eradication,
peasant struggles for agrarian reform, and universal concerns about the government’s
economic policies.” name="_ftnref" title="">[6]
After the
water war, Bolivian social movements focused their energies on two issues: they
mobilised around a politics of basic needs, demanding radical social reform,
and called for the nationalisation of natural resources.[7]
These demands later culminated in the ‘Gas Wars’ of October 2003 and May-June
2005. In October, 2003, massive protests erupted in El Alto and La Paz over
President Sánchez de Lozada’s proposed gas pipeline plan which would have
brought natural gas from eastern lowlands to Chile, where it would have been
liquefied for export to the U.S. and to Mexico.<a
href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref" title="">[8]
After six weeks of hunger strikes, highway blockades, mass mobilisations, and
street fights with the military, the protesters successfully put a stop to the
plan. The President subsequently fled the country for Miami, leaving Carlos
Mesa to take over the presidency. name="_ftnref" title="">[9]
President Mesa’s year and a half in power was also racked by continued protests
over renewed plans for a gas pipeline. By the time he was forced to resign in
June 2005, he had faced more than 800 protests and strikes, which had managed
to stall the neoliberal project in Bolivia.<a
href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref" title="">[10]
These movements were resourceful in
contesting the region’s political and economic systems and in challenging traditional
definitions of citizenship, democracy and participation. As they contested
power, privilege and policy, they also challenged the dominant economic and
racial groups as well as the politicians and institutions representing them.
Indeed, Vice President Álvaro García Linera, writing as a political analyst in
2001, stated that the movements revealed “an organizing force capable of
challenging the relevance of prevailing systems of government… and capable of
erecting alternative systems for the exercise of political power and the
conduct of legitimately democratic life.”<a
href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref" title="">[11]
Explanations of Resistance in Bolivia and the Need for a Historical
Perspective
When addressing the current phase of
social movement activity in the region, many scholars who write on the subject
from a broad variety of perspectives and employing a variety of theoretical
approaches tend to focus on the neoliberal reforms of the past few decades.<a
href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref" title="">[12]
Such arguments take many different
forms. Broadly, scholars have identified the following triggers of contentious
politics: the crisis of political representation, exacerbated by neoliberal
promises of greater inclusiveness name="_ftnref" title="">[13];the widespread frustration over the privatisation of sectors previously open to
public decision-making, such as economic policy, social service delivery, and
basic service delivery as part of neoliberal reforms[14];the anti-U.S. and anti-Chile feelings ignited over the gas pipeline project<a
href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref" title="">[15];the terrible social cost suffered by the great majority of Bolivians as a
result of decades of neoliberal restructuring<a
href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref" title="">[16];the effects of neoliberal reforms of challenging enclaves of local indigenous
autonomy[17];and the politicisation of indigenous identities following U.N. campaigns for
the recognition of indigenous rights and the associated rise of NGOs to address
the problem, along with the concurrent declining salience of class-based
identities during the decades of neoliberalism.<a
href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref" title="">[18]
These arguments certainly capture
various facets of the dynamics at play in the region. However, analyses that
focus too narrowly on neoliberal reforms of the past few decades often fail to
take into account the long history of mobilisation and resistance in the region
and the comparatively high intensity and spread of mobilisation in Bolivia.<a
href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref" title="">[19]
Many students of Bolivia emphasise that contemporary mobilisations and
resistance should be understood as expressions of “a collective consciousness
with deep historical roots,” name="_ftnref" title="">[20]
tracing the roots of contemporary mobilisations in the memories of the
1780-1781 anti-colonial uprisings lead by Túpaj Katari and Bartolina Sisa.<a
href="#_ftn21" name="_ftnref" title="">[21]
This type of argument is certainly not unchallenged; Le Bot, for example,
contends that indigenous peoples had, thus far, been submissive and passive. Moreover,
he argues that when they did mobilise, their movements were grounded in archaic
indigenist utopias. title="">[22] He goes on
to argue that contemporary indigenous movements are different from those of the
past, in that they are fighting for a personal autonomy grounded in
Enlightenment thought. name="_ftnref" title="">[23]
While most agree that the state of 1952 and the military-peasant pact of 1964
defused and contained social mobilisation through an enduring system of control
and cooptation, they also show that many Bolivians found ways to subtly resist
and subvert the precepts of this system, and on occasion to form oppositional
movements.[24]
The fact that General René Barrientos resorted to the military-peasant pact in
the mid-60s reveals the extent of the threat posed by the union militancy of
the tin mining sector. name="_ftnref" title="">[25]
Even in the case of those party to the military-peasant pact, however,
Cusicanqui provides evidence that many indigenous peasants found ways to
subvert the arrangement to protect their own ways of life.[26]
Such works serve as an important reminder that failure to effect massive change
and to be noticed does not equate submissiveness and passivity.

Moreover, the system of control and
cooptation began to crumble long before the onset of neoliberal reforms. The
1974 massacre of unarmed peasants in Cochabamba, known as the Massacre of
Tolada, deepened the crisis of state legitimacy and was followed by the rise of
oppositional indigenous movements. name="_ftnref" title="">[27]
Indigenous people began organising along ethnic lines in the 1960s and 1970s,
and began recuperating and nurturing the development of Aymara and Quechua
identities that currently foster solidarity for mobilisation.<a
href="#_ftn28" name="_ftnref" title="">[28]
According to Cusicanqui:

This “Katarista-Indianista” reawakening among the indigenous-campesino
unions of the altiplano (highland
plateau) and the Aymara-Qechua valleys resulted in the founding of the
independent Confederation of Bolivian Campesino Workers (CSUTCB) and several
indigenous political parties. This re-emergence of a popular, indigenous-based
political and ideological countercurrent to the state, anticipated and informed
today’s movements. title="">[29]

After the 1970s, the
legitimacy of the political order continued to deteriorate and was increasingly
challenged.[30]
Throughout the late 1980s, with the onset of neoliberal reforms, and the
beginning of the militarised campaigns to eradicate coca, strikes, mass mobilisations,
and marches became increasingly frequent and confrontational.<a
href="#_ftn31" name="_ftnref" title="">[31]

To be sure, the
modalities of resistance and mobilisation have changed with the times,
reflecting the constraints and opportunities provided by the system, but that
does not mean that the roots of contemporary mobilisations, and even less their
strength, can be explained primarily in reference to changes instigated by
neoliberal reforms. As Cusicanqui argues, “structural adjustment policies and the
dismantling of the country’s productive and industrial base were only the
culminating factors that brought this long-developing crisis to its breaking
point.”[32]

Overall, most students of the
subject seem to focus on the crises which trigger social mobilisation and
contentious politics, and on the opportunities and constraints that shape their
outcomes. What may be more remarkable, however, are the long history of mobilisation
in Bolivia and the ability of the movements to thrive and effect change despite
unfavourable neoliberal dynamics that have been associated with a certain
degree of silencing, neutralisation and cooptation.[33]
After all, neoliberal reforms and policies have been implemented the world
over, but they have not elicited the same kind of continuous widespread, and,
as many argue, effective mobilisations seen in Bolivia.[34]
Many Bolivians and students of Bolivia are beginning to argue that in order to
understand the power and effectiveness of Bolivian mobilisations and
resistance, one must look beyond elite actors and events, to the everyday
practices of most Bolivians. name="_ftnref" title="">[35]
Unfortunately, the overwhelming focus of the literature on change in the
hegemonic system, such as the onset of neoliberalism, on the counter-hegemonic
potential of social movements, such as the revolutionary potential of the
Katarista movement, and on the capacity of social movements to secure reforms, such
as the recognition of plurinationalism, has had the effect of obscuring the
many non-hegemonic indigenous movements, tactics and practices that escape the
logic of hegemony – of reform/ revolution – altogether.

Richard Day - Anarchist Trends in Theory
As will be illustrated in the
following pages, Bolivian politicians and activists, and students of Bolivia
have identified many non-hegemonic indigenous community practices that share a
certain affinity with postanarchist philosophy, the latest incarnation of an
intellectual tradition that has long recognised the transformative potential of
the working poor, peasants and other extremely marginalised groups.<a
href="#_ftn36" name="_ftnref" title="">[36]
Richard Day has developed a postanarchist framework for the study of social
movements. This framework is largely aimed at theorising the remarkable
potential of agents that have for the most part been considered marginal, in particular
that of indigenous peoples, by moving beyond the logic of hegemony. Through his
unwavering critique of hegemonic logic, and his weaving together of concepts
such as non-hegemony, social revolution, direct action, mutual aid and structural
renewal, Day categorically posits indigenous peoples as some of the most
successful resisters of totalising systems, and as some of the most promising
agents of the post-modern world. His emphasis on the micro-relations and
practices involved in structural renewal and social revolution provides a basis
from which to identify, explore and theorise the social capacity that feeds
collective action in Bolivia. Before exploring the affinity between
postanarchist philosophy and indigenous community practices in Bolivia, this paper
will first define the core postanarchist concepts that will be employed.

Non-hegemony: As articulated by Day, non-hegemony
refers to the plurality of practices and alternative ways of living enacted by
place-based communities, which do not have a totalising will – in other
words, practices that are not aimed at allowing a particular group to remake
the world in its own image, but rather at resisting totalising projects.<a
href="#_ftn37" name="_ftnref" title="">[37]
Moreover, as Day explains:

Non-hegemonic strategies rest on an understanding that state and
corporate forms, as structures of domination, exploitation and division, cannot
produce effects of emancipation. Non-hegemonic strategies call for social
rather than political revolution, thus transcending the dichotomy between
revolution and reform. name="_ftnref" title="">[38]

The politicians, activists and
scholars discussed below describe non-hegemonic practices without naming them
as such. As will be discussed below, self-managed ayllus, water committees, and
neighbourhood assemblies, are examples of non-hegemonic networks, in that they
do not seek totalising effects, but rather seek to meet the needs of the people
who form them.
Social Revolution:
Rather than seeking change by attacking the system in its totality
through political revolution, or using a strategy of reform and a politics of
demand, postanarchist philosophers argue that progressive change constantly occurs
through bottom-up changes in micro-relations and practices that take power away
from modernity. title="">[39] These
bottom-up changes, when taken as a whole, amount to social revolution. As Day
argues:

Unlike revolutionary struggles, which seek totalizing effects across all
aspects of the existing social order by taking state power, and unlike the
politics of reform, which seeks global change on a selected axes by
reforming state power, these movements/ networks/tactics do not seek totalizing
effects on any axis at all. Instead, they set out to block, resist, and render
redundant both corporate and state power in local, national and transnational
contexts. And in so doing, they challenge the notion that the only way to
achieve meaningful social change is by way of totalizing effects across and
entire ‘national’ or ‘international’ society.<a
href="#_ftn40" name="_ftnref" title="">[40]

By defining revolution in this way,
Day focuses attention on the power generated by the micro-relations and
practices that make up everyday life. His definition of social revolution,
however, is very narrow, as not all bottom-up social endeavours would lead to
this kind of social revolution. In order to lead to non-hegemonic social
revolution, bottom-up endeavours must engage in direct action in such a way as to produce structural renewal.

Direct Action and Mutual Aid:
Direct action refers to those practices and
tactics that are oriented to meet individual, group and community needs by the non-mediated
action of those individual, groups and communities, rather than relying state
or corporate forms. title="">[41] The related
practice of mutual aid involves the exchange of labour and resources for the
mutual benefit of groups and individuals. Whereas the concept of direct action
places emphasis on the non-mediated aspect of practices, the concept of mutual
aid places emphasis on their reciprocal quality.  As will be discussed below, one of the most well-known
examples of direct action and mutual aid in Bolivia is the water distribution
system that was built and managed by and for the poorest neighbourhoods of
Cochabamba.

Structural renewal:
As elaborated by Day, structural renewal involves a dual process of
disengagement and reconstruction through direct action and mutual aid.<a
href="#_ftn42" name="_ftnref" title="">[42]
Day credits Landauer for being the first to realise that political revolution
is not necessary to begin constructing a new world in the shell of the old.<a
href="#_ftn43" name="_ftnref" title="">[43]
Indeed, Landauer insisted that socialism cannot be achieved through reform or
revolution, but only through the creation of new institutions alongside
existing modes of social organisation.<a
href="#_ftn44" name="_ftnref" title="">[44]
As Day explains:

[Structural renewal] aims to reduce [the] efficacy and reach  [of state and corporate forms] by
withdrawing energy from them and rendering them redundant. Structural renewal
therefore appears simultaneously as a negative force working against the
colonization of everyday life by the state and corporations, and as a positive
force acting to reverse this process via mutual aid.”[45]

Finally, both Day and
Landauer emphasise that the construction of alternatives to state and corporate
forms is not preparatory work for an eventual political revolution, but rather,
social revolution itself. name="_ftnref" title="">[46]
The term will be employed in this paper to describe what indigenous peoples
have been engaged in for centuries, either by choice or by necessity, as they
have constructed and maintained alternatives to state and corporate forms in
order to survive and take control of their own affairs.

Social capacity in Bolivia – Anarchistic Trends in Practice<a
href="#_ftn47" name="_ftnref" title="">[47]
A relatively new set of arguments is
emerging among students of Bolivia. Scholars, politicians and activists are
emphasising longstanding, underlying enabling elements which may explain the
sources of social capacity in the country. Such arguments are present in the
public discourse of politicians and activists as well as in academic works. Vice-President
García Linera has been one of the most visible articulators of this line of
argument. For example, noting the uniqueness of the Bolivian process, the vice
president states:

Bolivia is inserted in planetary capitalism, but it is different from
other societies . . . community
structures have survived in the countryside, in the high lands, the low
lands, and in some parts of the cities and the barrios that have resisted
capitalist subjugation. […] This is different from American and European
capitalism, and it gives us an advantage.<a
href="#_ftn48" name="_ftnref" title="">[48]

Similarly, David Choquehuanca, a
Bolivian politician and activist, elaborates on the communal roots that
facilitate the construction of socialism in Bolivia:

We have always governed ourselves
in our communities. This is why we maintain our customs, perform our own music,
speak our own Aymaran language, in spite of a 500-year effort to erase these
things – our music, our language, and our culture. In a state of clandestinity, we have upheld our values, economic forms,
our own types of communitarian organization, which are all being
reappraised now. This is why we are incorporating into socialism something that
has survived for 500 years — the
communitarian element. We want to build our own socialism.<a
href="#_ftn49" name="_ftnref" title="">[49]

There has always been self-government,
autonomous entities. In some places, there are even organizational forms
that have been maintained for 500 years.<a
href="#_ftn50" name="_ftnref" title="">[50]

Some common threads emerge from the
excerpts quoted above, namely, the networked, communal, and self-organised
nature of indigenous communities. Students of Bolivia have expanded on these
threads, and have also emphasised the existence of a different conception of
leadership that has been described as back-seat driving.[51]
As will be discussed below, some have argued that these particularities of
indigenous communities in Bolivia impart an advantage to indigenous communities
in times of mobilisation and protest.

First, many scholars have noted
Bolivia’s rich networks (both historical and present) of campesino communities
(known in Bolivia as ayllus),
anarchist worker’s unions, campesino unions, neighbourhood associations and
many other forms of collective organisations.<a
href="#_ftn52" name="_ftnref" title="">[52]
These collective organisations, many argue, represent radical traditions of
organising that provide unexpected reserves of strength during periods of
mobilisation and protest. name="_ftnref" title="">[53]
Cusicanqui argues that:

Bolivia’s indigenous have clung to the root of their power: the simple
fact of being the occupants of a space for thousand of years, of naming it and
converting it into a cultural and productive space through the force of their
own fiestas, communal work, cultural resourcefulness and autochthonous
technology.[54]

The culturally grounded communal
political/economic/social/cultural practices enacted in ayllus represent remarkable
sources of non-hegemonic direct action practices as articulated in postanarchist
philosophy. To the extent that they ward off colonisation, continuously
decolonise what has been colonised, and create alternatives to state and
corporate forms, indigenous communities represent a powerful mechanism of
structural renewal.

This characteristic, which might
have been expected to decline with increasing urbanisation, is being recreated
in cities throughout Bolivia.  The
communal action that took shape around water issues in Cochabamba, for example,
may be one of the most widely reported examples of direct action in Bolivia. In
the city of Cochabamba, the water distributions systems were not built to reach
the poor neighbourhoods. The problem became unbearable as new migrants
populated the outskirts of the city. In order to alleviate this problem, the
residents of the poor neighbourhoods relied on their communal skills to solve
the problem for themselves: they created water committees, associations and
cooperatives and then they set to work using the scarce resources that they had
to construct distribution networks, build storage tanks, and drill wells.<a
href="#_ftn55" name="_ftnref" title="">[55]
As discussed above, in 2000, when the government of the day attempted to
privatise the water utilities, including the distribution system and wells
built by the poor neighbourhoods of Cochabamba, the residents of these
neighbourhoods organised a prolonged protest and managed to have the privatisation
cancelled.[56]
Today such committees are functioning throughout Cochabamba, and supplying
almost 30 percent of the population with water, through “an immense decentralised
network constructed on the basis of reciprocity and mutual aid and administered
in the same manner.” title="">[57] According to Raúl Zibechi, the success
of the water committees in building, managing and protecting their water system
is in large part grounded in the communal practices that the migrants brought
with them from their rural communities.<a
href="#_ftn58" name="_ftnref" title="">[58]
Some contend that this characteristic of Bolivian society carries a unique
potential for resisting and overturning dominant economic, political and
military arrangements. name="_ftnref" title="">[59]
Though it is generally framed this way by students of Bolivia, one could argue
that the unique potential of these communal practices rests in their ability to
create space for the cultivation and nourishment of social revolution.

Second, many have noted the horizontal,
self-organised, non-statist character of many indigenous communities.<a
href="#_ftn60" name="_ftnref" title="">[60]
While some have managed to maintain a non-state form, other communities, such
as those in El Alto, have acquired a non-state form, as settlers carried the
seeds of their old communities to their new one.<a
href="#_ftn61" name="_ftnref" title="">[61]
Highlighting the power of this characteristic, Zibechi argues that one of the
most remarkable aspects of contemporary mobilisation and protest is that much
of it has been carried out without the existence centralised organisational
structures.[62]
Most remarkable is that the lack of such structures does not seem to have
diminished the effectiveness of the movements and protests. Indeed, their
absence seems to have yielded more social energy.[63]
“The key to this overwhelming grassroots mobilisation is,” Zibechi argues, “the
basic self-organisation that fills every pore of the society.”<a
href="#_ftn64" name="_ftnref" title="">[64]
It is precisely because protest actions and mobilisation rely on an intensified
version of skills that they already practice in their everyday life, that
Bolivian indigenous people can carry them out so effectively and skilfully.<a
href="#_ftn65" name="_ftnref" title="">[65]
“Something like this,” he writes, “can only happen if there already exists, in
daily life, the habit of self-organisation.”<a
href="#_ftn66" name="_ftnref" title="">[66]
It is in this second characteristic that the non-hegemonic quality of
indigenous practices is most clearly illustrated.

This habit of self-organisation
practiced over the centuries by many indigenous communities can be understood
as a process of prefiguration. As Day argues:

[In the event of a revolution] very few people would be ready to accept
the life of non-domination and non-exploitation – most would seek new
masters, and a few would try to accommodate them. Avoiding the quest for
masters requires some experience in alternatives to slavery; it requires
prefiguration of other ways of being within and alongside existing practices.<a
href="#_ftn67" name="_ftnref" title="">[67]

Defining their movements, tactics
and practices as prefiguration seems to entail that they are preparing for some
great moment, presumably one of political revolution. In Bolivia, however, one
could argue that the revolution has been underway for quite some time. Indeed,
to the extent that indigenous communities are creating and recreating
communally grounded political/economic/social/cultural practices, thereby
limiting their dependency on state and corporate forms, they are engaging in
structural renewal and are building their new world in the shell of the old. In
so doing, they are engaging in a powerful social revolution, the likes of which
have likely never been equalled on the continent. From this perspective, the
election of Evo Morales is only an epiphenomenon of a much deeper and more
meaningful historical process. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of their organising
in resisting and warding off neoliberal hegemony may rest in the centuries of
practice in fighting hegemony with non-hegemony.

Finally, some students of Bolivia
have noted the different conception of leadership in Aymara and Quechua
communities. Ayllus are said to have maintained mechanism for the inhibition of
the concentration of power for centuries.<a
href="#_ftn68" name="_ftnref" title="">[68]
In reference to rural Aymara communities, Cusicanqui explains that:

They don’t need this leadership that is like permanent leadership. The
communities have leaders but as a rotational thing that is a service to the
community. It’s kind of a burden to be a leader for a community, you know? It’s
something you do once in a lifetime and you do because you ought to do, and
that the community says it’s your turn or the turn of your family. So, that
creates a totally different relationship with power structures and, in a way,
it decolonizes power and, to a certain extent, gives it back to the people.<a
href="#_ftn69" name="_ftnref" title="">[69]

Expanding on that argument,
Cusicanqui argues that there has long been cross-pollination between the rural
and urban communities, because of the affinity between the rural Aymara cosmovisión
(world view) and the urban anarchist unions, which has allowed this conception
of leadership to gain a foothold in urban areas.<a
href="#_ftn70" name="_ftnref" title="">[70]

This vision of leadership also seems
to have been transplanted and to have taken hold in El Alto. Roxana Seijas, the
director of the Federation of Neighbourhood Organisations of El Alto (FERUVE),
explains that the base communities refer to the leaders of FERUVE as stuffing.<a
href="#_ftn71" name="_ftnref" title="">[71]
Being a leader is a service to the community, it is never independent of the
base communities, and it entails a lot of hard work.[72]
Moreover, since the leaders are ‘stuffing’, they can be changed without harming
the organisation or changing its direction, because, as the analogy goes, the
people are driving from the back seat.<a
href="#_ftn73" name="_ftnref" title="">[73]
Students of social movements in Bolivia, such as Cusicanqui, Dangl and Zibechi,
have argued that this characteristic constitutes a strong advantage in times of
crisis, because it allows protests to take off and to be maintained without the
need for leaders. title="">[74]

El Alto may well represent the most
striking cotemporary expression of anarchistic practices in Bolivia. El Alto is
a rapidly expanding city of mostly indigenous people of Aymara and Quechua
heritage. According to Zibechi:

The insurrection of October 2003 that overthrew President Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada and tripped up the neoliberal project in Bolivia revealed the
existence of an alternative Aymara society that reached its highest point of
development in the area surrounding Lake Titicaca and finds its clearest
contemporary expression in the city of El Alto. This society has its own
political and social institutions, its own economy, and a culture that is
clearly distinct from the mestizo-white "official" society built on
state institutions and the market economy.<a
href="#_ftn75" name="_ftnref" title="">[75]

Indeed, the city seems to embody the
concept of structural renewal described by Day. El Alto has a long history of
social struggle, due in part to its strategic location above the capital of La
Paz.[76]
It was not until neoliberal reforms lead to the massive displacement of
indigenous campesinos from their rural communities to El Alto, however, that it
gained the unique urban form that it has today. In 1976, the city had a
population of 95,000 people; today the population has jumped to more than a
million. The most arresting characteristic of the city is that it was built by
and for the residents, and that it is largely self-organised by the residents.<a
href="#_ftn77" name="_ftnref" title="">[77]
More than 500 neighbourhood councils combine to make the Federation of
Neighbourhood Councils of El Alto. Most residents of the city are part of a
council, where they engage in works of collective solidarity and mutual aid to
construct and improve their city. name="_ftnref" title="">[78]
Reflecting the rich heritage and traditional organisation of the Aymara and
Quechua ayllus, the councils are organised horizontally in such a way that
encourages radical participatory democracy while inhibiting the concentration
of power.[79]
This appears to be a very clear example of the non-hegemonic strategy of direct
action, described by Day, being put to practice. By building from the bottom-up
on a myriad of micro-relations and practices, inhabitants of El Alto are
building alternatives to state and corporate forms and showing the world how such
alternatives can be employed to build a new world in the shell of the old.<a
href="#_ftn80" name="_ftnref" title="">[80]
It should be said that the situation in El Alto is precarious by any standard:
most of the residents do not have access to waste collection services, most do
not have access to health care, many are illiterate, and most live in abject
poverty.[81]
This does not detract, however, from all that they have succeeded to accomplish
for themselves, but rather is indicative of how much work they have yet to do.
Indeed, according to Zibechi, though they still have much to accomplish, the
residents are aware that they have constructed and managed everything for
themselves, and they are proud of what they have accomplished.<a
href="#_ftn82" name="_ftnref" title="">[82]

Conclusion

These three characteristics of
Bolivian indigenous communities – their communal spirit, their self-organised
quality, and their different conception of leadership –<b
> represent powerful underlying enabling
elements of social capacity in Bolivia. The failure to notice these Bolivian
dynamics, on the part of most students of the region, may rest in the fact that
Latin America resistance has long been theorised through liberal and Marxist
paradigms of state-based social change. As postanarchist philosopher, Richard
Day, has observed, the Marxist revolutionary strategies that characterised
left-wing politics and scholarship for much of the 20^th century
followed a logic of hegemony in seeking state power to reverse the relationship
between the oppressed and their oppressors.<a
href="#_ftn83" name="_ftnref" title="">[83]
Post-Marxist and liberal reformists, on the other hand, pursue a strategy of
demand and integration within the current hegemonic system.[84]
For some time, he argues, the dominance of these paradigms has had the effect
of obscuring many non-hegemonic movements, tactics and practices that seek to
escape the logic of hegemony – of reform/revolution – altogether.[85]

What is
most interesting about these indigenous practices is that by operating
non-hegemonically rather than counter-hegemonically, they have provided, and continue
to provide, a viable alternative to the logic that forces agents and scholars
alike to choose between strategies of reform which strengthen the current
system, and strategies of revolution which leave off all possibility of
substantive change to a distant future. Given that the current wave of mobilisation
seems to be rejecting not only unsatisfactory possibilities of reform within
(neo)liberalism, but also Marxist strategies of revolution, increased attention
to non-hegemonic action seems particularly timely. <span
lang="en-gb">

To be sure, many liberals and
post-Marxists are now focusing on traditionally overlooked groups.<a
href="#_ftn86" name="_ftnref" title="">[86]
The problem is that the emergence of these groups as important political actors
is often explained in terms of changes related to neoliberal reforms. Scholars associate the declining
salience of the worker, worker’s unions, and the working class with the end of
the Cold War and the general decline of the salience of communism as an
ideology, thereby positing traditionally overlooked groups as new actors. While arguments that the
rise of traditionally overlooked groups reflects the decline of the class-based
identities certainly captures part of the dynamic, they fail to account for the
broadening of who counts as relevant actors, and of what counts as significant
practices of resistance. This broadening reflects more than the declining
salience of class politics – it reflects the diminishing dominance of
modernist thought as a whole. As totalising projects and unidirectional
conceptions of time and progress lose salience, the value of peoples and
practices, which had hitherto been considered outdated, unfortunate residues of
a miserable past, is made visible. Accordingly, these actors may be less new,
than newly visible. This distinction is crucial, because if these actors and
practices are not new, they do not merely represent new potential, but a
longstanding underlying strength. Indeed, the potential of the ‘great
disintegrated masses’ name="_ftnref" title="">[87]
had already been recognised by anarchists at the time of the First International,
when it became a major source of contention between Marx and Bakunin.<a
href="#_ftn88" name="_ftnref" title="">[88]
The claim of post-Marxists that these actors are new, therefore, can at best be
interpreted as a symptom of the widespread ignorance of anarchist philosophy in
academia, and at worst, as wilful omission.