PROCLAIMING REVOLUTION: BOLIVIA IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

 

Book review:

Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective.

Edited by Merilee S. Grindle and Pilar Domingo. Cambridge, MA: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University / London:

Institute for Latin American Studies, University of London, 2003. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 424 pp.

Proclaiming Revolution is an important contribution — the first book of its kind to approach the implications and consequences of the 1952 revolution in comparison with other Latin American revolutions of similar magnitude. The book addresses — from the distance of a half century and in the heat of recent global market influences — Bolivia’s crisis of modernity and the problems it has faced in the consolidation of democracy.

The book uses important historiographic sources in order to understand the revolutionary process from the angle of the actors involved. Among the volume’s notable contributions are essays by Sinclair Thompson, Brooke Larson, and Laura Gotkowitz, who research indigenous and peasant participation in the political panorama of the 1950s. The abolition of traditional indigenous labor obligations and the establishment of universal suffrage did not just represent elements of modernization and democratization; these transformations also converted Bolivia’s indigenous population into an ethnic force of considerable potential. This bloc has consolidated its political identity and put forth new demands as part of the democratization of the 1990s.

Indigenous presence in Bolivian politics is directly connected to the 1952 revolution. As a result, Proclaiming Revolution reflects on the revolutionary protagonists outside of the epic account constructed by nationalist leaders. The book instead contextualizes the political transformations of the time within a historical vision of neocolonialism that survives to this day in Bolivia.

The volume stimulates, in a authoritative manner, reflection on how the Bolivian Revolution attempted to construct a national project of modernization. The reach of revolutionary politics, analyzed by Juan Antonio Morales, Herbert S. Klein, and Manuel E. Contreras, indicates how Bolivia entered into the modern era by means of political violence that nevertheless envisioned educational reform, economic development in the hands of the state, and social mobility tied to an accelerated program of industrialization.

The book allows us to compare Bolivia’s 1952 revolution with political events 50 years later. Viewed from this perspective, one must conclude that (taking the modern world as a model) Bolivia has collapsed. This collapse has taken place on three fronts. In the realm of economics, contemporary debate emphasizes that Bolivia has not overcome poverty because, in spite of the revolution, it continues to be based on a contradictory social order — very far from the optimistic vision of the nationalist revolutionaries of the 1950s. Second, the arrival of neoliberal structural adjustment in the 1980s could not be adapted to the new conditions of globalizing economic markets, even though it did destroy the model of the state and the nation that emerged from the 1952 revolution.

Today, the concept of the nation has been replaced by the idea of the cultural historical heritage, in which particular ethnic identities are exalted, insisting on the specificity of Aymaras, Quechua, Guarani, Chimán, Cayubaba, and so on. Third, the concept of industrialization that prevailed in Bolivia as a result of the influence of revolutionary nationalism has floundered in the face of the global economy and the power of transnationals.

Pessimism concerning Bolivia’s hopes to becoming a modern industrialized society has thus returned. The events we are currently witnessing result from the transformation of the concept of nation and the erosion of the concept of a homogeneous society following the triumph of mestizaje. This is the end result of revolutionary nationalism and, in a way, has brought about the collapse of the political party that proclaimed it, the Movimimento Nationalista Revolucionario (MNR).

Proclaiming Revolution also helps us to understand the alarming events of October 10 – 17, 2003, which resulted in the resignation of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, president and head of the MNR. His downfall put an end to a half century of myths of modernity and the reign of revolutionary nationalism.

The unresolved problems of development and the new politics of the global market show how the old code words of modernity, national identity, and industrial transformation that defined Bolivia’s 1952 revolution have grown stale. The radical political processes of the 1950s forced a national integration that ended up producing new patterns of elite domination without altering the underlying conditions of inequality. These structures of inequality, problems of political representation, and the push of certain contemporary reform policies are brilliantly analyzed by Merilee Grindle, Pilar Domingo, and Eduardo Gamarra.

The 1952 revolution cultivated the idea that it would be possible to achieve a modern society through integration. However, Proclaiming Revolution makes us think of a plane of “dismodernization” — that is to say, a crisis of integration in Bolivia. Dismodernization refers to a state marked by globalization and dominated by multiple identities that are difficult to integrate. It avoids national articulation in order to make room for the demands of a more complicated world, completely distinct from the ideals rooted in the 1952 revolution. Today’s efforts are a struggle to achieve a rearticulation that cannot be reduced either to a closed ethnocentrism or to an economic modernism that is overly exclusive, such as that touted by contemporary neoliberalism.

Proclaiming Revolution permits us to see the possibility of creating a society that is more humane, reconstructing diverse socio-cultural identities in order to reinvent the Bolivian nation “sin mayúsculas”—the plurimulti “nation” and not “Nation.”

Franco Gamboa Rocabado, Duke Center for International Development and Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz

Book Reviews / National Period 191, February, 2006.