is a member of the Viewpoint editorial collective and a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Was it a coup? Yes. Should people with a preference for emancipatory politics support the coup or oppose it? We can only be against it. When we move from definitions and position-taking to the level of politics, however, simplicity gives way to murkiness. How did this coup happen? What conditions made it possible?
Where elites bumble and jockey, possibilities arise. That is why in the radical uncertainty of our moment, the Left needs to strategize and organize for a revolutionary break. If we’re not prepared with a revolutionary scenario of our own, the struggles of elites may swallow us up.
The Re-encounter of Indianismo and Marxism in the Work of Álvaro García Linera • The Phantom, The Plebeian and the State: Grupo Comuna and the Intellectual Career of Álvaro García Linera • Burdens of a State Manager
By Robert Cavooris. Álvaro García Linera, vice-president to Bolivia’s Evo Morales, was perhaps the first Marxist intellectual to sit in state power in the 21st century. His work reflects a continued engagement with a unique political experiment in Bolivia, and can be read, therefore, as a guide to a terrain on which some are trying to plow an eventual road to socialism. It is the wager of this dossier, therefore, that much can be learned by more closely examining both Linera’s theory and his political practice – not only to understand the man himself, but also, to understand the innovative political process from which he cannot be separated, and which may portend something of the future for the electoral Left in other parts of the world.
As people throughout Latin America react to the unsparing neoliberal policies that swept the region in the 1980s and 90s, Venezuela has become the hinge of a much broader leftward turn. This shift has impelled massive political transformations in Venezuela and Bolivia, stirred more moderate resonances in the Southern Cone, and in the cases of Paraguay and Honduras, aroused reactionary coups. As one of the few left political projects of its scale in the post-Soviet era, this Latin American marea rosada, or pink tide, is a material testing ground for the transition from capitalism to something else – leaving open for now the question of whether this something else is communism – and it demands substantive discussion on the Left.
Viewpoint Magazine