By Álvaro García Linera on June 30, 2022
Álvaro García Linera photo: Octavio Nava
Certainly, what happened in Bolivia presents a certain degree of exceptionality. They could not win electorally and, therefore, resorted to violence. However, this kind of right-wing comeback can also occur in other ways in other parts of the continent and the world. Police-military coups are not the only way in which the right wing can regain power. For example, in Brazil, there has been a judicial coup d’état or lawfare, which refers to the use of the judiciary to disregard the will of the people and of the electoral majorities.
Another form comes from the hand of devastating chains of media aggression that, taking advantage of the corporate monopoly of private media and multimillion-dollar manipulation campaigns in social networks, decompose public opinion, instill artificial fears in the population and obtain electoral victories by flattering the “sad passions” of an already debased society.
In all cases these perverse tactics of political destabilization find effectiveness by capitalizing on the weaknesses of progressivism, especially those that arise when distances are produced between the government elites and the popular social organizations that sustain them, or also when the first generation reforms of progressive governments are exhausted or fulfilled.
In both cases, with the coup d’état of 2019 we learned some lessons. The first is that the right wing we face today is not the same right wing of the beginning of the 21st century. At that time the continental right was battered, the system of domination in the region had been shaken by the great plebeian uprisings with which the century began. In Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, there had been great social mobilizations, in some cases popular insurrections, which had allowed the horizon of neoliberal collective expectations to be shattered and cornered. The Washington Consensus no longer generated hope and had lost its historical optimism
Today the right is no longer the same. It is crusted and enraged. It no longer mobilizes the imaginary of a universal in which everyone fits, even the “losers”, since it always produced the illusion of a new “challenge” in which the “loser” was someone else. Today, it transmits a sordid resentment and melancholy. Resentment against the equalized plebs, against the poor young people who put their “security” at risk, against the migrant who occupies jobs they despise, against women who no longer tolerate patriarchal tyranny, against the “communists” who want to expand the protective State. And melancholy for the old glory days, when there was no progressivism, when women were at home, when young people were watched, when workers had no unions and when State decisions were made in foreign embassies or in the offices of big business corporations.
They are the furious nostalgics of a past of general consensus around business ideology turned into common sense. Today, that impoverishing illusion has exploded into a thousand divergent pieces and, then, what remains of its fragments is a violent crusade against the “infidels” of a crepuscular and moldy order. Against the poor, especially the young, who are threatened with being prophylactically locked up in their neighborhoods. Against the workers, who are promised the return of an autocracy of labor precariousness. Against women, who are intimidated with a return to their enchainment in the disciplines of the old traditional family. And to the indigenous, the guarantee of returning them to the whip of the hacienda and social marginalization.
We are, then, before a right wing in a mad war against the collapse of its old world order. It does not seek to seduce, but to annihilate; it does not seek to convince, but to punish; it does not summon, but threatens, wrapped in an armor of hatred against the insolent. That is why it has become increasingly authoritarian, violent and blatantly anti-democratic.
The post-dictatorial right wing we knew at the end of the 20th century was liberal-democratic because there was a consensus between free market and electoral democracy. Why was there a consensus? Because there was no divergence among the political elites. In the eighties and nineties, everyone, whether right or left, shared that horizon. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Welfare State had gone into crisis around the world and everyone embraced the free market and globalization, even repentant and defeated leftists. Therefore, representative democracy was articulated with the free market. From the year 2000 onwards this changes. There is a divergence of elites around the world and especially in Latin America. Whether due to rebellions against neoliberal “adjustment” policies or to the collapse of free market solutions, a great divergence has been unleashed in the political-economic projects of parties and social organizations. England has separated from the European Union; the United States has set itself the goal, with Donald Trump and then with Joe Biden, of privileging the internal market, i.e. protectionism, under the slogan “America first”. Globalization was fine when they held world hegemony, but it is a problem when others, in this case China or India, begin to become the world’s factory and flood us with their products, including the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these contradictions. To confront it globally, market solutions have been abandoned. Everyone has turned to the state, starting with the stock exchanges and the CEOs of the mega-corporations who have implored nation states to issue money to pay salaries, buy back shares and pay off debts. It has been the central banks of the US, England and the rest of Europe -that is, institutions of the reviled public space that have distributed tens of trillions of dollars everywhere and not Wall Street- that have saved world capitalism from the worst economic crisis of the last one hundred years.
This fracturing of the global consensus around the free market, this new dispute between protectionism on the one hand and free trade on the other, this renewed claim of the state to redress the social tragedy produced by globalization is marking the twilight of a neoliberal model that is not ready to retire without first putting up a pathetic and furious fight. Its violence is inversely proportional to its legitimacy. And that is why the center-right has debased itself by transforming itself into an authoritarian and racialized ultra-right. The 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia is an extreme example. But it is not an irreproducible exception, it is a trend.
It is no coincidence either that in the USA, one of the oldest liberal democracies in the world, in January 2021 the Parliament was stormed and the losers of the elections spoke of fraud; or that in Spain a famous novelist of liberal affiliation pointed out that “the important thing about democracy is not that there is freedom to choose, but that one chooses well”. That is to say, if one does not choose “well”, that is, one’s own people, then it is better to take away the people’s right to choose. This threat goes directly to the poor, the humble, the peasants, because they are prone to elect “populists”, “leftists”, which means that they choose “badly”. According to this instrumentalist perspective, democracy is good as long as its sector wins. As soon as it loses, it is no longer good, and then, tanks, planes and helicopter gunships come to do the dirty work. This, which we thought was over in the seventies and eighties of the last century, is once again peeping over the horizon and is something we have to watch out for in the immediate future. And it’s not just a North or South American political degeneration. It is global. When you see prestigious French and German philosophers whipping up new versions of religious wars with the intention of protecting European citizen “purity” in the face of migration, or calling for the formation of a European army to contain the “Asian” threat, we are dealing with a corrupted liberalism that appeals to racism and militarism to protect its shrinking fiefdoms.
At the same time, this recycled right wing has innovated its methods and means of advocacy. It not only occupies the institutions, manipulates media oligopolies, finances political parties, squanders corporate financing; now it also occupies the streets, deploys molecular ideological wars, feeds narratives of hatred and revanchism. It has learned lessons from the last twenty years when the left had the monopoly of the streets and of the molecular strategies of public opinion formation. It is a more “Gramscian” right wing that has learned from what happened in the last decades, which generates a more complicated situation. In fact, sometimes they occupy the street more than we do. And this is a big mistake, because the street, the neighborhood, the factory, the university, the square, the march, the assembly, the collective action should always be our territory, the territory of progressivism, of the left, of revolutionaries.
That is where we come from, that is where we are, that is where we build everything. Even the struggle for institutional powers is fragile if it does not have as a correlate the active and protagonist presence of the streets.
Second progressive wave
Let us now analyze the situation in which the progressive and leftist forces that have come to government find themselves. They present changes and, inevitably, difficulties.
The first progressive wave, which occurred between 2000 and 2015, was undoubtedly the most virtuous decade of the last fifty years in our continent. 70 million people who went to bed hungry moved out of poverty and extreme poverty and into middle-income status. This means that the person who sells us candy on the corner, that the young precarious worker who works in a factory, that the neighbor who lives in a small rented room with her three children and has no job, in that decade could find a decent job, or save a little to buy a piece of land, or improve the food for her children, or send her daughter to college, or expand her small business, or pay the loan for her apartment; that is, it meant a material revolution in the living conditions of millions of humble and hard-working families.
In other words, it meant a material revolution in the living conditions of millions of humble and hardworking families. During that decade, salaries improved, there was enormous economic growth and wealth was redistributed. The case of Bolivia can serve as an illustration: if at the beginning of that period six out of ten Bolivians were poor and four out of ten extremely poor, in one decade this situation improved to three and one out of ten, respectively. The economy has grown by an average of 5% annually for 13 consecutive years. The minimum wage of a Bolivian worker – the poorest country in Latin America after Haiti – also went from US$42 to US$302 in the same period of time. Thousands and thousands of peasant families stopped collecting water from puddles to drink and were able to open a tap in their homes to enjoy drinking water. The rustic rooms with leaks and imaginary blackboards of the public schools in the poor neighborhoods and the countryside gave way to large modern buildings, where children learn and eat with dignity. The indigenous and the peasant, always poor and discriminated, were not only recognized and came out of poverty, but also became state power to reorganize the physiognomy of the common of a plurinational society.
These changes, with greater or lesser intensity, we have lived them throughout the continent that became “pink” or “red”, that is, mostly progressive. However, as of 2015, the first generation of reforms began to be fulfilled and, when fulfilled, to be exhausted. Because today those reforms we made in the first wave are already insufficient in the face of the environmental crisis, the medical crisis we are experiencing and the economic crisis that unleashed all of this. The world has gone backwards economically. On average, Latin America has fallen nine points in its gross domestic product, that is, we have returned to the wealth we had in 2008 or 2010. The pandemic is still an open wound that has brought more poverty, business closures, unemployment, indebtedness, weakening of social wealth, that is, a very complex panorama. Therefore, the reforms of the first generation of progressivism, which were already showing signs of weakening, do not have the initiative to face in a lasting and sustainable way these new historical circumstances caused by the “great encirclement” of 2020-2021.
We are therefore facing a paradoxical fact that characterizes the world: neither neoliberalism proposes a long-term plan that is not simply a violent and melancholic return to the traces of the past, nor progressivism presents a horizon with the capacity to overcome the difficulties that have emerged from the pandemic and the economic and environmental crisis. This is how this moment of collective stupor, of a certain paralysis, in which time seems to be suspended, has come about. It is a luminal time. We become aware of the time that passes only when we imagine a concatenated line of events leading to an end. Perhaps we will never know with certainty what that end is, but in our imagination we order our life, our daily life, our relationships with our partner, our university, our class, our friends, in a concatenation directed towards a goal that functions as a horizon. But when that collapses because we do not know if we will be alive in a year, if we will keep our job, if we will be able to save or if our daughter will be able to go to school or university, that is, when our possibility of imaginatively foreseeing the future breaks down, as it is now, time stops. Although physical time continues to pass, social time seems to be dilated; an infinite number of things happen every day and yet it is as if it were stopped because there is no longer a continuum of events oriented towards an imagined destiny.
Uncertainty is the spirit of the times.
We are in a portal in which we know what no longer works, what is wrong, what bothers us; but we do not know what will make it go back, what is coming.
This is a current characteristic of the times that is accentuated because the competing political projects are proving to be weak to dispute the collective imaginary of hope; both the overheated and zombie neoliberalism that perseveres and is not able to conquer optimism in the face of history, and the first wave progressivism, which did a good job but is not able to outline the next wave of reforms. So, in general there is this paradoxical moment, suspended or liminal time. The important thing about these paradoxical times is the suspension of the predictive horizon. During such lapses, one goes from anguish and stupor to, sooner rather than later, readiness for new beliefs, which produces a cognitive crisis. People can endure one, two or three years with time suspended, but at some point they need to cling to a future, more or less realistic or fanciful, but carrying imagined certainty. Humans are, above all, beings of beliefs. This is the great difference between human beings and other living beings: we need to invent a belief about what the future will be like.
Today we are in the stage of universal stupor, but sooner rather than later will come the stage of cognitive readiness to revoke old beliefs and put new ones in their place. And in this struggle of new ideas-force, two tendencies are confronting each other today. On the one hand, the right-wingers, who have raised the banner of a new holy war and see themselves as the new crusaders, with their helmets, armor, shields and spears. They propose to confront the supposed new enemies of freedom, who would be the progressives, the “populists”, the Indianists, the “communists”. When the ultra-conservative mayor of Spain said: “Indianism is the new communism”, she was appealing to that Manichean way of dividing the world, typical of the fifties. Today there are not many communists, but there is no doubt that communism is for capitalism the terrifying specter of its own death, the perpetual reminder of its contingency. What we have for now is progressivism, and within it are the communists, the socialists, the Indianists, the national-popularists, etc. But that which we embrace under the name of “progressivism” has become the great enemy of the right wing. And for them it is not only a political adversary, but -what is worse and more serious- a moral enemy.
The other force in contention, which still timidly battles for the organization of that horizon of predictability of the future, is the left, progressivism, the national-popular. And it is here where we have a historical obligation or responsibility: to recover for our side the banners of hope, because politics is, in essence, the conduction of collective hopes and the State, as a hierarchical synthesis of society, it is the monopoly of these hopes.
Therefore, whoever monopolizes or manages collective yearnings becomes the power of the State. In this dispute, what is going to happen in the continent will depend on which are the forces that delineate the new generation of hopes of society, and we cannot stop there. The first wave of hopes and reforms of progressivism was born at the beginning of the 21st century and lasted a decade and a half. These have already completed their cycle. Now it is up to all of us, and especially the youth, to generate, fight, produce the objectives or the second generation reforms of Latin American and world progressivism capable of recovering enthusiasm in the struggle for equality, social justice and universal community. This program of new and more radical transformations of the State, the economy and society will not emerge from an isolated cavil, from a speculative effort of how the world should be. They are collective creations that correspond to the spirit of an epoch, to all that is emerging as a collective expectation in the midst of and against despair, stupor and paralysis. In other words, it is a social product; not just a governmental or academic product. The first generation reforms also emerged from society, and the leading role of the progressive leaders who accompanied those changes arose precisely from their ability to have understood them, to have given them a representable body, a well-founded narrative and decisional effectiveness from the government.
The second generation reforms of this new progressive wave must also be rooted in society, that is, be the fruit of our debate, of our marches, of our mobilizations, of our writings, of our research, of our assemblies. In the midst of the uneasiness that wants to suffocate the horizon, in a coated, fragmented, to some extent chaotic way, there are the glimmers of collective hopes. And the task of a social leader, of a revolutionary political leader, of a researcher committed to equality, is to separate that hope from the waste that imprisons or deforms it, to help articulate it with the hopes of other popular sectors, to better condense its enunciation in order to give way to its mobilizing molecular irradiation. If the spirit of the times is truly captured, these proposals quickly take hold in the social demand, because they assemble with the framework of people’s expectations and availabilities and become popular common sense in action.
Excerpt from the book La Política Como Disputa de las Esperanzas by Álvaro García Linera, who was vice president of Bolivia from 2006 – 2019. The entire book in Spanish can be read and downloaded for free here. https://www.clacso.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/La-politica-como-disputa.pdf
Source: Alai, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano – English