Populism, Hegemony, and the Politics of Natural Resource Extraction in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Abstract

Is populism necessary to the articulation of counter‐hegemonic projects, as Laclau has long argued? Or is it, as Žižek maintains, a dangerous strategy, which inevitably degenerates into ideological mystification and reactionary postures? In this paper, I address this question by exploring the politics of discourse in Evo Morales's Bolivia. While, in the years leading to the election of Morales, a populist ideological strategy was key to challenging neoliberal forces, once the hegemony of the new power bloc was stabilised, indigenous demands for emancipatory socio‐environmental change began to be perceived as a threat to resource‐based accumulation. In this context, the populist signifiers that originated in indigenous‐popular struggles were used by the Morales government to legitimise repression of the indigenous movement. I argue, therefore, that ideological degeneration signals a problem not with populism per se, but rather with the class projects and shifting correlations of forces that underpin it in changing conjunctures.

Resource nationalism

“…Although natural gas is now Bolivia’s main export product and the most important source of income for the national treasury, the country continues to be popularly known as a país minero – ‘mining country’ – for the historical importance of its mining industry (Bebbington, 2012, 2015; Bebbington and Bury, 2013; Díaz-Cuellar, 2017). While Bolivia, like most Latin American countries, has experienced dramatic swings in recent decades between political right and left, the governments’ reliance on extractive industries for both economic development and political legitimacy has remained constant (Andreucci, 2017; Schilling-Vacaflor, 2017). As was the case with his neoliberal predecessor, socialist President Evo Morales has promoted the mining industry as crucial to national development, sovereignty and identity, while attacking indigenous and environmentalist opponents of mining with similar vitriol (Marston, 2017).…”

Resource geography II: What makes resources political?

“…Given the political tumult of 2016, there will be increased attention to the role of resource regions in shaping ‘populist’ political movements. Andreucci (2017) shows how Evo Morales’s ‘populist’ anti-neoliberal project in Bolivia has become fractured as indigenous and other movements threaten resource-based accumulation. Marston and Perreault (2017) offer a deeper history of how small-scale cooperative miners are central to changing populist and hegemonic formations of Bolivian politics (on both the left and the right).…”

Geographies of Indigenous Identity: Spatial Imaginaries and Racialised Power Struggles in Bolivia

“…This is due to the compromise the government struck with the opposition parties in altering the more radical provisions on land reform in the draft constitution approved by the Constituent Assembly. As Andreucci () observes, if the government had not done so, it would have had more land to redistribute and could have reduced the tensions between these two sectors. The end result of this decision taken by the government was that the highland indigenous peasants began to see the big land owners as an enemy too powerful to confront and decided to seek agricultural land in the lowland indigenous ancestral territories, sparking off tensions between these two sectors.…”