E L S E W H E R E TEXTS

E D I T E D BY

G ayatri C hakravorty S p iv a k and Hosam A b o u l -E la

The series takes as its charge radical new directions in the engage­
ment with the literary culture of the non-European. The point of
departure here is the scandalous notion that the literary figure of the
Global South is as human as the European, complex, subject to the
dynamism of history, fluid, unrepresentable, and impossible either
to essentialize or reduce to any glib counter essentialism.
As such, elsewhere texts emphasizes those aspects of this sub­
ject s dynamism that have been radically de-emphasized in the stock
metropolitan representations. So, the series centers the intellectual
dimension of literary culture elsewhere. The regions that Orientalists
represented as non-idea-producing areas are revealed to be the oppo­
site. Furthermore, modernity of ideas is engaged by the series’
metatheoretical under-standing of the process of translation, the
mechanism through which the unfixed nature of intellectual work
may be most fully acknowledged. Finally, elsewhere texts under­
stands theory as commitment, emphasizing that genre of theoretical
discourse which through its engagement—its heightened sense of
the social power of ideas and rhetorics—calls into question the sup­
posed abstract transcendence of the god terms ‘theory’, ‘text’, ‘idea.
This engaged dimension of the elsewhere text insists on the histori-
cism of theory at the same time as it forges a new intellectual glob-
ality embodied here in intellectual work translated for the critical
traditions of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America in ail
their diversity.
s
VW-p

R E N É ZAVALETA M ER CA D O

Towards a History o f the National-Popular in Bolivia ,

1879-1980

T R A N S L A T E D BY A N N E F R E E L A N D

LONDON NEW Y O RK C A L C U T T A

f ' CT c*
' ; ni i 1* * )
L- O v t Vi / ’
 Seagull Books, 2018

Originally published as Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia, 1986

© Alma Reyles, 2014
Series Introduction © Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2018
Introduction © Sinclair Thomson, 2018
English translation and Afterword © Anne Freeland, 2018

ISBN 978 0 8574 2 358 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Seagull Books, Calcutta, India

Printed and bound by Maple Press, York, Pennsylvania, USA
 CONTENTS

vii
ELSEWHERE TEXTS

General Introduction
G ayatri C hakravorty Spivak

xvi
INTRODUCTION

Self-Knowledge and Self-Determination at the Limits o f Capitalism

Sinclair T homson

l
Prologue

17
CHAPTER ONE

The Struggle for Surplus

98
CHAPTER TWO

The World o f the Fearsome Willka

190
CHAPTER THREE

The Torpor o f Centuries

284
Afterword
A nne F reeland

299
Bibliography
 :

__
 ELSEWHERE TEXTS

General Introduction

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

‘Theory’ is an English transcription of the Greek theorem. Corre­

sponding words exist in the major European languages. Our series,
‘Elsewhere Texts’, works within these limits. ‘Theory’ has been cre-
olized into innumerable languages. Yet the phenomenon of ‘seeing
or making visible correctly’—the meaning in Greek that will still
suffice—does not necessarily relate to that word—‘theory’—in those
languages. That describes the task of the editors of a translated series
on theory in the world. How does ‘theory’ look elsewhere from the
Euro-US? Since our texts are modern, there is often an at-least-
implicit awareness that ‘proper’ theory looks different as the ‘same’
theory elsewhere.
Heidegger thinks that truth is destined to be thought by the man
o f‘Western Europe’.1Our series does not offer a legitimizing counter-
essentialism. Take a look at the map and see how tiny Europe is, not
even really a continent, but, as Derrida would say, a cap, a headland.2
Such a tiny place, yet who can deny Derridas description, which is a
historical and empirical observation? Look at the tables of contents

1 M artin Heidegger, W hat Is Called Thinking? (J. Glenn Gray trans, and
introd.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
2 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe (Pascale-
Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas trans) (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992).
viii • GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

of the most popular critical anthologies and you will see corrobora­
tion of the essentialist conviction that goes with the historical claim.
The counter-essentialism is reflected in the choice of critics from ‘the
rest of the world’, and today’s espousal o f‘the global South’. Just being
non-white is the counter-essence.
The influential Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, for
example, lets in only Maimonides before the modern university sys­
tem kicks in.3But even if they had let in Khaled Ziadeh, Marta Lamas
and Marilena Chaui, the material would be determined by the epis­
temological procedures of that system.4 Norton lets in W. E. B. Du
Bois, the first African-American to get a doctorate from Harvard,
the man who felt that ‘of the greatest importance was the opportunity
which my Wanderjahre [wandering years] in Europe gave of looking
at the world as a man and not simply from a narrow racial and
provincial outlook’.5 Du Bois emphatically claimed that the African-
American was the best example of the subject of the Declaration of
Independence (the Founding Fathers were standing in). It is there­
fore significant that here he claims to inhabit the persona of Wilhelm
Meister, Goethe’s hero, with trajectory not fully reversed. Meister
came to the United States to act out the European Enlightenment
in this new land—a trip described in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Travels]—a hope which Du Bois
nuanced, perhaps as soon as his scholarship to the Friedrich Wilhelm
University from the Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen was

3 Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
4 These authors were published by Palgrave in a series similar to this one,
under the same editorial collaboration.
5 Cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘The Black Letters on the Sign: W. E. B. Du
Bois and the Canon in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 8: Black Folk
Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xvi.
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION • ix

cancelled, the year after President Rutherford B. Hayes death [1893],

by a Standing Committee on Education chaired by a former lieu­
tenant colonel in the Confederate Army, the army that had fought to
retain slavery and the slave trade in the US Civil War. (Hayes himself
might have destroyed the possibility of Reconstruction by the 1877
Compromise with the Democrats. Du Bois as a young man was crit­
ical of his racism but probably not aware of political details, as he
was later.)
In the Norton Anthology, we get Zora Neale Hurston (Columbia),
Langston Hughes (Harlem Renaissance via Columbia), Frantz Fanon
(University of Lyon), Chinua Achebe (University College, Ibadan),
Stuart Hall (Oxford), Ngugi wa Thiongo (Leeds), Taban Lo Liyong
(Iowa), Henry Owuwor Anyuumba (Iowa), Spivak (Cornell), Hous­
ton Baker (UCLA), Gloria Anzaldua (UCSC), Homi Bhabha
(Oxford), Barbara Christian (Columbia), Barbara Smith (Mount
Holyoke), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge), bell hooks (UCSC).
The point I am making is not that these writers have not challenged
Eurocentrism. It is that they are sabotaging from within, and this is
a historical fact that must be turned around so that there is a chance
for widening the circle. Fanon stands out, not because he is not a uni­
versity man but because he is the only one who clearly operated out­
side the Euro-US, though he was what Du Bois would call a Black
European, literally fighting Europe, also from within, located in a
geographical exterior.
(In the next most influential anthology, the rest-of-the-world
entries are almost identical, but for Audre Lorde [Columbia], Geral­
dine Heng [Cornell], Ania Loomba [Sussex], Chidi Okonkwo [Uni­
versity of Auckland], Jamaica Kincaid [Franconia and New School].6
Again, Fanon is the only working outsider. I am sure the general pat­
tern is repeated everywhere. I have myself been so tokenized through

6 Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Malden,
MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2004).
• GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

my long work-life as representing ‘Third World criticism’ that I am

particularly alive to the problem.7)

O ur position is against a rest-of-the-world counter-essentialism,

which honours the history-versus-tradition binary opposition. We
recognize that a hegemonic Euro-US series can only access work
abroad that is continuous with Euro-US radicalism.8 To open our­
selves to what lies beyond is another kind of effort. Within the limits
of our cause, we focus, then, on another phenomenon.
The history of the last few centuries has produced patterns of bi­
lateral resistance. The formation is typically my nation-state, my
region, my cultural formation over against ‘the West’. These days
there are global efforts at conferences, events, organizations that typ­
ically takes the form of the Euro-US at the centre, and a whole col­
lection of ‘other cultures’, who connect through the imperial
languages, protected by a combination of sanctioned ignorance and
superficial solidarities, ignoring the internal problems when they are
at these global functions.9 The model is the fact and discipline of

7 An example that has stayed with me over the years remains Diane Bells
excellent Daughters o f the Dreaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), which, in response to requests for inclusion of Third World mate­
rial, put in Trin-ti Min-Ha and me, longtime faculty persons in prestigious
United States universities!
8 This continuity and the discontinuous are beautifully staged in the film
Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako. Jean-François Lyotard gave a clear
articulation of the problem of discontinuity in The Différend: Phrases in Dis­
pute (Georges Van Den Abbeele trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
9 My most recent experience is to encounter a Maori activist bookseller and
an Indian feminist at such a convention, who had never heard of Frederick
Douglass, where only in response to my questions did the South African par­
ticipant admit to political problems with translation between indigenous lan­
guages, and the m ainland Chinese participant to the barrier between
M andarin and Cantonese. Examples can be multiplied.
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION » xi

preservation. By the Nara document of 1994, Japan insisted that

preservation should be not only of built space but also of intangible
cultural heritage. What started was the model that I have described.
It is now a tremendous capital-intensive fact of our world.
In and through our series, we want to combat this tendency. We
want not only to present texts from different national origins to the
US readership but also to point out how each is singular in the philo­
sophical sense, namely, universalizable, though never universal. We
are not working for area-studies niche-marketing, though the work
is always of specialist quality. In the interest of creating a diversified
collectivity outside of the English readership, a long-term feature
might be a conference bringing the authors together.

The story begins for me in a conversation with the Subaltern Studies

Collective in 1986—asking them if I could arrange the publication
of a selection—because they were not available in the United States.
A long-term preoccupation, then. To this was added Hosam Aboul-
Ela’s 2007 consolidation of a thought that was growing inside me:
from the rest of the world, literary editors wanted fiction, poetry,
drama—raw material. Theory came generally from ‘us*. Seagull
Books, the only publishing house based in South Asia with direct
world distribution, and unlike most Western conglomerates unin­
terested in translations of theory not recognizable by the Eurocentric
cosmopolitan model, seems now the appropriate publisher.

In the intervening three decades, a small difference has imposed

itself, the one I have been emphasizing so far, the justification for
elsewhere*. Earlier I had felt that my brief within the profession was
to share and show that the work overseas was really ‘theoretical* by
Western sizing. (I use the word ‘size’ here in the sense of pointure in
Derrida.)10 Hence ‘strategic use of essentialism*. Now I also feel the

10 I have discussed this in ‘Inscription: O f Truth to Size’ in Outside in the

Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 201-16.
xii • GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

reader must learn that ‘theory’ need not look the same everywhere,
that for the independent mind, too much training in producing the
European model in stylistic detail might hamper. In my teacher­
training work in rural India, it is the illiterate man who understands
things best because his considerable intelligence has not been hob­
bled by bad education or gender oppression. The lesson here is not
that everyone should be illiterate but that strong minds should not
be ruined by bad education or imperatives to imitate.
The caution would apply to Neighborhood and Boulevard by
Khaled Ziadeh (belonging to our earlier series, see note 4)—not bad
education, obviously, but the imperative to imitate ‘French Theory’.11
Ziadeh, in spite of his time at Sorbonne, was not tempted. He theo­
rizes by space and repetition; Hosam Aboul-Ela’s introduction to that
book walks us through it. There are plenty of people writing in Ara­
bic who produce work competitive with the best in European-style
‘theory’. Reading Ziadeh, as Aboul-Ela points out, we have to learn
to recognize ‘theory’ in another guise. My own work profits from his
account of the de-Ottomanization of the city by the French into an
‘Islamic’ space; because I think de-Ottomanization, still active in our
time, has a history as old as the Fall of Constantinople, and, reterri­
torialized, backwards into Byzantium. Today’s Khilafat movement
can be read as an example of how imperial historical violence can
produce a counter-violence of no return.

Our series has only just begun. I have described our goal with appro­
priate modesty: to translate theoretical material operating outside

1 1 1 use this phrase with the French nationalist irony reflected in François
Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et Cie et les mutations de la
vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2003), available
in English translation as: French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &
Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Jeff Fort trans., with
Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION • xiii

the Euro-US, not readily available to metropolitan readership but

continuous with the episteme, even as ‘hybridity’ keeps the local else­
where. Yet there are also singular enclaves in many places where
teaching and thinking apparently take place in less continuous epis-
temic formation. To acquire texts from these enclaves would require
the kind of preparation, partly traditionalist, partly anthropologistic,
that I do not possess. Perhaps, if our initial forays succeed, we will
be able to fling our net wider: particularly important in the context
of sub-Saharan Africa, where strong theoretical writing in the impe­
rial languages (also languages of Africa, of course) flourishes and
holds influence. For theoretical writing in the indigenous languages,
not necessarily imitating the European model, contained within
internal conflict, avoiding the anthropologist in the name of tradition
will be on our agenda. Towards A History of the National-Popular in
Bolivia by René Zavaleta Mercado is our inaugural text.
To begin with, my understanding of an activist ‘Task of the Editor
was as I have outlined above: to combat the bi-lateralism—my place
and your Euro-US—that legitimizes Eurocentrism by reversal. Today
this is complicated by the confrontation between nationalism and
globalism. Can an elsewhere text supplement both?

Our series starts, then, with René Zavaleta Mercado, sometimes

called the ‘Bolivian Gramsci’, perhaps because he introduced ques­
tions of culture into a generally Marxist position. In fact, his life, of
a young bourgeois ideologue from the country going through many
transformations by way of varieties of journalism and a periodic
apologists involvement in the state has a trajectory somewhat dif­
ferent from Gramsci s. The two held one conviction in common, res­
onating with our conjuncture as well, that education into social
justice is both one-on-one and collective, thus countering the tired
mechanical Marxist accusation of ‘individualism’. This is not only a
recognizable ‘Latin American theoretical imprint today but also
shared widely elsewhere, as witness Darko Suvins variation in his *
XIV • GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

New Years message for 2017: ‘Whoever doesn’t fight collectively will
lose singly’.12

Down the line, a translation of Luis Tapias groundbreaking book

History and Politics in the Work of René Zavaleta is under editorial
scrutiny. Translation work is well under way on the collected literary
writings of Paik Nak-Chung, the brilliant Korean public intellectual.
He is important for our world because he grasps the ‘literary’ in all
its worldliness, and philosophizes the possibilities for a way out of
gated nation-states. Translation has begun on Mononer Modhu, a
philosophical text by Arindam Chakrabarti which, in the best com-
parativist tradition, deconstructs European philosophizing into ways
of thinking that it otherwise ignores. Also underway is Gender, Con­
text and the Politics of Writing by Dong Limin from China, a power­
ful critic of many accepted social gender paradigms. We are waiting
for a reader’s report on a book of essays in Sesotho—one of the lan­
guages of South Africa—by S. M. Mofokeng, Pelongyak ka (literally,
‘In My Heart’), published in 1962. Our thanks to Njabulo Ndebele
for this suggestion.

Our translators share with us the problems of translation for each

unique text, at least hinting to the reader that, although the activity
of translating is altogether pleasurable, to accept translations pas­
sively as a substitute for the original’ closes doors. We will not give
up the foolish hope that a careful translation, sharing problems, will
lead to language-learning.

12 See Darko Suvin, ‘Tko se ne bori zajedno, izgubi pojedinaino . . . ’

[Whoever Doesn’t Fight Collectively Will Lose Singly . . . ], interview with
Sa$a Hrnjez, July-August 2015. Available at: https://goo.gl/X7Kkto (last
accessed on 7 January 2018).
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION # xv

Read our series as a first step, then. Come to the projected con­
ferences if they happen, where all of the authors and translators will
gather to ask: What is it to theorize elsewhere, in our world?
 IN T R O D U C T IO N

Self-Knowledge and Self-Determination

at the Limits of Capitalism

SINCLAIR THOMSON

Sooner or later, each society learns that to know itself is

almost to prevail.
René Zavaleta Mercado

On 23 December 1984, at the age of 47, Bolivia’s greatest political

theorist René Zavaleta Mercado died of brain cancer in Mexico City.
His wife had rushed him from La Paz back to Mexico in order to try
to save his life but the late-hour emergency efforts turned out to be
in vain. At the time, Zavaleta was still in the early stages of drafting
his most original and ambitious work, Towards a History of the
National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879-1980. It remains difficult not to
associate his death with the simultaneous crisis and collapse of the
Democratic and Popular Unity (UDP) government which upheld ele­
ments of Zavaletas own democratic, socialist and anti-imperialist
politics. That catastrophe set the stage for the orthodox structural
adjustment and implementation of the neoliberal model the following
year. Broadly viewed, Zavaletas own life and thought were insepara­
ble from the unfolding and unravelling processes of revolution and
counter-revolution that he interrogated and illuminated with such
depth in his writings.
More than 30 years after the agonizing denouement in 1984,
with the crisis of the revolutionary left and the truncation of his own
radical intellectual project, Zavaletas final work is here offered for
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION # xvii

the first time in English for an international audience. What are the
reasons for bringing out his book today?

I
If we follow Zavaletas own method here, we can address our question
from both specific historical-political and general conceptual angles.
Zavaleta died at a time when an important historical cycle of left-
popular political struggle had recently peaked and a socialist alter­
native whose potential had been briefly glimpsed was now rapidly
dissolving. From the 1950s to the time of his death, Zavaleta had
himself moved from a revolutionary nationalist affiliation towards a
more orthodox Leninism and ultimately to an increasingly creative
and heterodox Marxist position. From the late 1970s to the early
1980s, democratic trade-union struggle, with proletarian centrality
and key collaboration from the peasantry, had successfully brought
to an end 20 years of right-wing military dictatorship. The role of
the national trade-union confederation (Central Obrera Boliviana
[Bolivian Workers Central] or COB) in the UDP government had
initially posed the promise that the power of workers could chart a
new course for economic and political organization in the country.
Yet the administration finally imploded amid state economic mis­
management and private-sector financial speculation, staggering
hyper-inflation and government inability to channel the mass mobi­
lizations flooding the streets and plazas of the capital. The full-blown
chaos set the stage for a counter-revolutionary turn in 1985, imme­
diately after Zavaletas death, which would lead to a consolidated
neoliberal regime, one of the first in the world to operate under civil­
ian rather than military political control.
A generation later, there nevertheless emerged a new conjunc­
ture reminiscent of Zavaletas own times. The neoliberal cycle in
Bolivia began to fall apart in the years after 2000 as a series of popular
insurgencies swept away the old regime and created an opening for
new leftist, indigenous and nationalist projects. The process in
XV I 11" • SINCLAIR THOMSON

Bolivia accompanied simultaneous challenges to the Washington

Consensus around South America and a regional shift towards a
social-democratic centre-left option that became known as the Pink
Tide. In this regional context of opposition to neoliberalism, Bolivia
stood out as the insurrectionary frontline and its mobilizations were
distinguished by the centrality of indigenous social movements. By
2006, they would catapult into power Evo Morales of the Movimiento
al Socialismo [Movement to Socialism or MAS] party who would
consolidate alliances particularly with Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba
to challenge longstanding US hegemony in the region.
There was also an accompanying intellectual ferment that caught
the attention of some international observers on the left. In 2009,
Emir Sader of Brazil commented that the ‘post-neoliberal’ political
developments in Latin America had not generated a corresponding
body of theoretical and political analysis on the left.1The prominent
exception to the rule, he asserted, was the Comuna group in Bolivia,
whose nucleus consisted of Luis Tapia, Alvaro García Linera, Raquel
Gutiérrez and Raúl Prada. Tapia and Prada were independent intel­
lectuals on the Bolivian left and Garcia Linera had met Gutiérrez, a
Mexican militant, while studying abroad in Mexico City. The couple
returned to Bolivia to organize a guerrilla movement with an Indianist
profile, which led to their detention. The collective coalesced in the
late 1990s after Gutiérrez and Garcia Linera were released from
prison. Its production combined Marxist theory with concrete and
conjunctural inquiry into power relations in Bolivia, while Gutiérrez
included radical feminist reflection among her contributions to the
group.
Sader appreciated how Comuna had elaborated an interpretation
of the political and economic cycles and the formation of political sub­
jects in contemporary Bolivian history in a way that illuminated the
potential for an alternative to neoliberalism in the new millennium.

1 Emir Sader, The New Mole: Paths o f the Latin American Left (New York:
Verso, 2011), pp. 75-9.
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xix

Sader deserves credit for perceiving the creativity and insight of the
left analysis in Bolivia in the 2000s. Yet he did not ask what gave rise
to this current of critical Marxist thought. The answer has to do with
the rich tradition of radical nationalist, indigenista and left political
writing in Bolivia going back to the time of Bolivia’s national revo­
lution in the mid twentieth century. Despite the collapse of Marxism
as a political and intellectual option in much of the West and despite
the deep defeats of popular forces in Bolivia in the late twentieth cen­
tury, an organically rooted intellectual tradition persisted in the polit­
ical subsoil. The foremost figure in that radical tradition was none
other than René Zavaleta Mercado, and the Comuna group was in
many ways a new generational offshoot from that long tradition of
political reflection.2 If that generation of critical left thought has
recently acquired some visibility internationally, especially with the
election of García Linera to the vice-presidency of the MAS govern­
ment in 2006, it is now time for the deeper tradition out of which it
emerged to come to light. It seems opportune to revisit the rich
legacy left by Zavaleta at a time when Bolivia has become, more than
ever in its history, an international reference point for activists in
social movements and intellectuals on the left.

II
If Zavaleta continued to offer appreciable reserves and resources for
critical political thinkers in the revolutionary conjuncture of the early
twenty-first century in Bolivia, it was ultimately because of the over­
all coherence and depth of his theoretical project. The rationale for
translating Zavaleta for an international readership today ultimately
rests on the value of this project.

2 The Zavaletian prologue to one of Comunas first collective books, El retorno

de la Bolivia plebeya (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2000) offers perfect evidence.
It noted: ‘The possibility of reconstructing a worker and popular horizon is
not in simple resistance, in the prolongation of the agony, but in radically
thinking through the crisis, learning from it, to understand the weaknesses
and blockages of the past and to understand the world.’
XX • SINCLAIR THOMSON

The fundamental problem that Zavaleta came to grapple with in

his late work was how to conceive of historical development in soci­
eties that were not fully governed by capitalist social relations. He
saw that the conceptual apparatus of social science and social theory
developed for capitalist societies could not be automatically applied
to social formations that were not themselves fully regulated in cap­
italist terms. As he wrote in his essay ‘The Masses in November’: ‘The
pretension of a universal grammar that can be applied to diverse for­
mations is usually no more than dogmatization.’3 He believed that
Marxism provided the most profound and coherent apparatus for
social explanation, yet it had been developed to understand the cap­
italist formations of the industrialized West. The categories and
frames for understanding modern England, France or Germany
could hardly be applied to make sense of a country such as Bolivia
that was largely rural and agrarian, lacking the more developed class
dynamics of industrial society, the political frames of liberal citizen­
ship, the aesthetic fields of bourgeois culture, the private realm of
individuated subjectivity. If the analysis of such societies could not
be productively apprehended simply in terms of an intrinsic deficit
(or a yearning for what might be) compared with a Western ideal-
type, where did that leave social theory if it were to be produced out­
side the capitalist West?
Zavaleta’s response to this dilemma was to begin from a
metropolitan Marxist framework—which he referred to in typically
condensed allusive fashion as ‘the theory of value’—while acknowl­
edging the inherent limits of doing so. The epistemological challenge
for the theorist on the periphery, in his view, was to produce a distinct
conceptual framework and a set of concepts suited to the distinct
social conditions that were the object of analysis. This procedure

3 René Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Las masas en noviembre in Obra completa, vol . 2

(La Paz: Plural, 2013), p. 107. The im portant two-volume publication of
Zavaleta’s complete works was splendidly edited and introduced by Mauricio
Souza Crespo.
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION • xxi

could only be carried out through a serious inquiry into the specific
historical and political processes that had given rise to the society in
question. Such an engagement provided an alternative to the sterile
option of applying an abstract framework devised for another reality
or to the empty option of holding reality to a standard it could only
meet in some imagined and ever-postponed future. Instead, the task
was to work off a more universal frame while producing intermediate
concepts elaborated through concrete analysis of particular historical
and political realities. What makes Zavaletas approach so rich, deep
and dynamic is that he acknowledged the partiality of the theorists
intellectual position and saw that conceptual production itself
inevitably depended on the very historical and political conditions
that the theorist sought to understand. There was, however, no alter­
native method for a society at the margins of advanced capitalism to
come to know itself and thereby to determine itself.

Ill
Zavaleta was in fact only embarking on this ambitious project when
it was cut off. If he certainly had not drawn any sort of theoretical
closure and we do not know how he might have gone on to revise
and refine his work, he did succeed in outlining some general pos­
tulates and generating a cluster of concepts that indicate the overall
direction and potential of his approach.
Some of these notions are of more global applicability. For exam­
ple, the first of the hypotheses announced in the prologue to his
book immediately indicates his distance from vulgar or economic-
determinist interpretations of modern state formation as a reflection
of surplus accumulation. Bolivia did not produce a modern state in
the nineteenth or early twentieth century not because the country
was poor but because it was incapable of internalizing its surplus and,
more fundamentally, because it had neither the social ‘receptivity*
nor the state ‘willingness* (disponibilidad) to do so. A second example
comes from the third set of hypotheses in the prologue where he
xxii • SINCLAIR THOMSON

indicates that the famous problem of political instability in Bolivia

derives from the question of legitimation, which can only be under­
stood in terms of the history of the mass’ own perspective on things.
We can already see in such points a Marxism that is not economistic
and that takes seriously the past experience and optic of the subaltern.
But a yet-more-crucial set of his notions about the relationship
between state and civil society are also of global relevance. Zavaleta
speaks of this correspondence in terms of a ‘social equation or ‘social
optimum’, which will be higher where the patterns and codes of state
power conform to the institutions and ideology present in civil
society. Bolivia, by this standard, had a historically low degree of
such correspondence in comparison with the bourgeois societies of
Western Europe. Another term used by Zavaleta in this period
(though not in this book) to refer to this fundamental relationship
is the ‘primordial form’ and he sought to historicize it by referring
to the ‘constitutive moment’ in which that relationship took on its
basic structural composition.4 The idea is not that a given constitu­
tive moment—such as the Spanish conquest in the colonial period
or the Federal War of 1899 in the liberal-oligarchic period or the
national revolution of 1952—locks society and state into a fixed con­
dition, but that it sets deep parameters for subsequent historical
development until another moment of profound crisis and transfor­
mation resets those parameters. These concerns run throughout
Western sociology, and not only Western Marxism, and hence
Zavaleta begins his prologue citing Max Weber to declare that his
project examines the connection between social democratization and
state form.
In other respects, however, Zavaleta is interested to move from
such universal conceptual problems towards those that concern social
formations like the Bolivian one in which capitalism has had but a
partial purchase historically. Hence in the third set of hypotheses in

4 René Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Forma primordial y determinación dependiente’

in Obra completa, vol. 2.
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxiii

the prologue, he speaks of the degree of homogeneity required for

representative democracy to be effective, a condition not found in
Bolivia where, he writes, ‘It is more important to know the result of
an election in the three main cities, in the mining centres and in two
or three peasant districts than in the country as a whole.’5 By this
token, institutions such as the political party or the trade union can­
not be assumed to exercise the same roles in Bolivia that they would
in Europe where they originated. In other late work, he would take
up the question o f ‘dependent determination, referring to the degree
of foreign influence or imposition in societies in which the state-
society relationship is less cohesive and more conflictual and hence
in which sovereignty is less solid.6
But the essential question in Zavaletas final work is the hetero­
geneity of the economic and social formation in such regions periph­
eral to the metropolitan capitalist core, a phenomenon which he
idiosyncratically termed abigarramiento, meaning ‘motleyness’. For
Zavaleta, the unitary nature of the political state is consistent with
the more homogenized condition of civil society in industrial capi­
talist formations but inconsistent with the composite and disarticu­
lated condition of formations in which capitalist relations do not
prevail thoroughly and effectively. (It is this inconsistency that gives
the state its merely ‘apparent’ aspect in a place like Bolivia.) This is
not a superficial assertion about the presence of cultural diversity
and mixture. A common but erroneous notion in Bolivian discus­
sions is that abigarramiento is a peculiar way of talking about the
country’s ‘multiethnic and pluricultural’ reality, to use the terms
enshrined in the 1994 constitutional reform.
Rather, the category captures a deeper and more complex his­
torical phenomenon and draws from a sophisticated debate about
modes of production within Latin American Marxism in the 1970s.
In that period, theorists and historians concurred that the colonial

5 See p. 16 in the present volume.

6 Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Forma primordial’.
XXIV • SINCLAIR THOMSON

history of Latin America made it impossible to apply any exclusive

notion of a feudal or a capitalist mode of production to the region,
or to describe any simple transition from one to the other, according
to a Western European model. Ernesto Laclau’s formulation concern­
ing the articulation of coexisting but distinct modes of production
within a single economic and social formation, in which one mode
or another could subsume or exercise a prevailing influence over the
others, thus generated substantial interest. Yet an alternative inter­
pretation emerged as well—namely, the historical possibility that no
one mode of production might prevail over the others and that a
given social formation might be characterized by the lack of any effec­
tive articulation.7Zavaletas category of the abigarrado refers precisely
to such an unresolved fragmentation in Bolivia, and suggests this
possibility for other colonial or postcolonial societies outside of
advanced capitalism and the metropolitan centre.
In the Bolivian case, we can conceive of a gamut of types of pro­
duction. Communitarian forms emerged with the pre-conquest
development of agriculture in the Andes. Nomadic hunting and gath­
ering in the Amazonian and Chaco lowlands likewise preceded
European settlement and continued thereafter. Seigneurial forms
arose with the implantation of the colonial hacienda system (and
overlapped with the longer-term phenomenon of tributary extraction).
Production based on servile and enslaved labour was also present in
Andean and colonial forms. Capitalist forms of production took early
root and spread from the colonial mining centres, especially Potosí.
Over centuries after the conquest, commercial capital partially linked
some of the disparate spheres of production. Ultimately in Zavaletas
view, capitalism never managed to achieve an effective reorganiza­
tion and total absorption (‘real subsum ption) of other existing
modes of production.

7 For a review of the historiographic positions in this debate, see Steve J. Stern,
‘Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin
America and the Caribbean, The American Historical Review 93(4) (October
1988): 829-72.
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxv

Zavaletas conception was not narrowly economic but, rather,

contemplated how the social and technical relations involved with
any given mode of production entailed cultural, moral, legal, ideo­
logical and other civilizational features. He saw the heterogeneity of
the productive modes as existing within two major civilizational
matrices, the agrarian and eventually the industrial. He notably asso­
ciated these civilizations with the coexistence of distinct temporali­
ties or temporal densities within society.
Finally, Zavaleta elaborated certain concepts with specific ref­
erence to the Bolivian case, in an attempt to move beyond a merely
negative conception of the society as lacking the characteristics of
the European ideal type and to construct a more compelling under­
standing of the Bolivian historical process. An example of this is his
notion of the seigneurial paradox, mentioned in the second hypoth­
esis of the prologue. Seigneurial power for Zavaleta was found not
only in the rural landlord sector but also in the quasi-sovereign ter­
ritorial and political dominion exercised by the great mine-owning
magnates into the twentieth century. He held that, contrary to what
a conventional historical model might expect, seigneurial power in
Bolivia was surprisingly resilient, capable of reconstituting itself even
out of major transformations such as the national revolution of 1952.
This capacity could be explained by the fact that its underlying pro­
ductive relations were not necessarily modified by juridical and polit­
ical shifts in the course of modern history. But by the same token,
agrarian civilization in the Andes had also been transformed only
partially and superficially through colonial and republican history,
thus explaining its ongoing conflict with elite and state projects such
as liberalism.
xxvi % SINCLAIR THOMSON

IV

Considering Zavaletas late work in the light of critical intellectual

developments at the global level, it is also notable that it was simul­
taneous with, in some ways complementary to, and yet also different
from the move made by the Gramscian historians in the original
South Asian subaltern studies project. The Indian historians certainly
were prompted to engage with methodological and epistemological
problems, just as Zavaleta, unlike most of the other Latin American
Gramscians in the 1960s and 1970s,8was compelled to move towards
history. For one and the other, the aim was not simply to apply
metropolitan theory uncritically to a local case but also to deploy it
as a tool to explain historical reality in the complex and fragmented
specific conditions of the colonial and postcolonial world. Yet the
national-popular was not a Gramscian category appropriated in a
significant way by the South Asian historiography, and the subaltern
category did not particularly preoccupy Zavaleta. When the subal­
tern studies school did reach Latin America, after its sometimes
touted and sometimes disparaged reception in the metropolitan
academy, it was not through the more globalized academic circuits
of Buenos Aires or Mexico City. In a seeming paradox, the Latin
American reception passed through Bolivia, long seen from outside
as an intellectual backwater. Part of the reason had to do with the
rise of Bolivia’s autonomous indigenous political and cultural move­
ments which could fit the bill for properly ‘subaltern subjects. If any­
thing, the national-popular theme, with its connotations of cultural
homogeneity and its potential implication of an alternative state pro­
ject, could sound at odds with a subalternist vision of indigenous
autonomy intrinsically counterposed to state power. Yet in their 1997
translation and edition of a set of key subaltern studies texts, Silvia
Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán would cite Zavaleta as a

8 Anne Freeland, ‘Gramsci in Latin America: Reconstitutions of thè State

(PhD dissertation, D epartm ent of Latin American and Iberian Cultures,
Columbia University, New York, 2017).
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxvii

prime example of the rich critical tradition of theoretical and histor­

ical analysis of colonialism produced within Latin America, if often
overlooked by writers based in the US and Europe. The richness of
that tradition in Bolivia—itself reflected in the work of the two
women who edited the volume—is surely another reason why it
would become the site for translation of the South Asian project for
a Latin American audience.9
For radical historiography in a global scope, Zavaletas book
stands out as a rare effort to follow through in grounded historicizing
fashion on Antonio Gramscis intriguing if bare sketch of the
national-popular concept. But we must acknowledge that if Gramscis
category was tentative, Zavaletas historical project was likewise only
incipient. The very title of the work is significant in this sense. The
Mexican edition of Zavaletas text, published in 1986 by Siglo XXI,
was titled simply Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia, conveying an
abstracted sociological object. The Bolivian re-edition in Zavaleta’s
complete works retains this title.10 In this English translation, Anne
Freeland has opted instead for the title that Zavaleta himself left.
Towards a History o f the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879-1980
acknowledges the open-ended but also the centrally historical nature
of his project.
For Zavaleta, the national-popular was not an essence or object
that existed outside history but, rather, a phenomenon that could be
identified within its contingent, complex and shifting causal pro­
cesses. He sought to identify the emergence and occasional coales­
cence of distinct popular sectors as a political force that could
challenge the domination of an elite group which did not exercise

9 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán (eds), Debates post colo­
niales: Una introducción a los estudios de la subalternidad (La Paz: SEPHIS/
Aruwyiri, 1997).
10 René Zavaleta Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia in Obra completa,
vol. 2 (La Paz: Plural,
2013). Plural had also republished the work in an inde­
pendent edition in 2008.
xxviii • SINCLAIR THOMSON

power in the interests of the masses. He conceived of this coalescence

as an intersubjective process that constituted, in Gramscian terms, a
historical bloc that could alter the terms of coercion and consent pre­
vailing within the society. What bears emphasis is that, in this
account, there was no foreordained subject to follow the prescribed
steps of any revolutionary teleology. If Zavaleta saw Bolivia’s mining
proletariat as exercising a central role in the fraught political strug­
gles of the mid twentieth century, its very centrality supposed the
existence of other popular subjects with which it was in political
interaction and intercommunication. His attention to the anticolo­
nial insurgencies led by Tupac Amaru and Tupaj Katari in the late
eighteenth century, the community mobilizations under Pablo Zárate
Willka in the late nineteenth century and the neo-katarista mobi­
lizations during the general strike of 1979 reveal that he came to take
very seriously the indigenous peasantry as a political subject in its
own right and one that could have a decisive role in the formation
of a national-popular project in Bolivia. In other words, he acknowl­
edged the complexity of the class and ethnic dynamics that could
play into any national-popular movement. By exploring the history
of the subaltern actors and their alliances which had taken shape
since the eighteenth century, he sought to frame an understanding
of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period of his own time.
The lucidity with which he did so would help his successors do the
same in our own.
Here again, we must come back to the critical issue of Zavaleta’s
own self-reflexive epistemological approach in a sociological context
o f‘dubious quantifiability’, as he put it. For the national-popular was
not only an object of historical analysis. It was no less a cognitive
strategy which he elaborated, given the limits of a general theory of
value in the Latin American setting, out of the specific historical
and political conditions that marked the late phase of his own life.
The 1979 general strike, which brought together mineworkers,
indigenous peasants and other urban popular sectors to confront the
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxix

reactionary military regime of General Alberto Natusch Busch, made

a powerful impression on Zavaleta. It allowed him to see beyond his
earlier concentration on the working class as a vanguard political actor
and to understand proletarian centrality as part of a wider irradiation
of democratic forces and a fuller process of the self-determination of
the masses. This expansion of his own vision allowed Zavaleta to
rethink Bolivian history more generally and to experiment with the
national-popular as a crux for interpreting the fundamental relation­
ships between society and the state.
This raises the question of the potential scope of national-
popular politics and intersubjectivity. Zavaletas own conception
expanded from a narrow focus on class to one that included ethnic
subjectivity, as a result of the unfolding of political struggle in his
own time. In the early twenty-first century, the social mobilizations
in Bolivia included a range of forces aside from indigenous and pro­
letarian ones, such as territorial organizations of neighbourhood
associations, generational groups of students and street kids, and
middle-class professionals, which could also be thought of as part of
a national-popular bloc in Zavaletas terms.
One of the noticeably absent elements in Zavaletas analysis is
gender. This is perhaps unsurprising given its relative neglect within
formal theory and practice on the left. On the other hand, it is
intriguing that gender themes did not push themselves more fully
into Zavaletas field of awareness given his view of the vanguard role
of miners and the particular protagonism of women mineworkers in
key moments of national-popular struggle in Bolivia. According to
the legendary account of the Catavi massacre, it was Maria Barzola
who, Bolivian tricolour in hand, led the striking miners into the line
of fire of the government troops in 1942. After the 1952 national rev­
olution, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario [Revolutionary
Nationalist Movement or MNR] named the members of its militant
female auxiliary force ‘Barzolas’. The trade-union federation of Bolivian
mineworkers had a longstanding ‘housewives’ organization which
XXX • SINCLAIR THOMSON

played the leading role in bringing down the right-wing military

regime of General Hugo Banzer Suarez with its hunger strike in
1977-78. It is true that middle-class feminism had limited political
force in Bolivia and that class and anti-imperialist discourse was pre­
eminent in the ‘housewives’ organization. However, if we follow
Zavaletas own reasoning about the production of local political
knowledge as a result of local political conditions, it cannot be said
that women themselves have been absent from national and popular
struggle.
In the international context, socialist feminism, feminist social
history and postcolonial feminist theory all provide bases upon
which to rethink critically the history and politics of the national-
popular project from a gender standpoint. In the Bolivian context,
to take the case at hand, there are also local political and intellectual
bases. For example, Domitila Barrios de Chungara was one of the
women mineworkers who led the hunger strike that ultimately
restored democracy in the country, and her classic 1978 book Let Me
Speak! is often taken as an original instance of the Latin American
literary genre of testimonioy in which a narrator from an oppressed
group relates her or his life as a witness of popular suffering and
struggle. Barrios de Chungaras account reflects the fact that gender
power relations in the household and the community were a signif­
icant concern of working-class women and were connected to their
wider political consciousness and engagements.11 To take another
example: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui began her radical sociological
career in the late 1970s and early 1980s writing about indigenous
Aymara history and political struggle in the era of the neo-katarista
mobilizations. In fact, her intellectual work and activism contributed
to Zavaletas own move to take seriously the role of indigenous move­
ments in Bolivian history. Over time, Rivera herself began to take

11 Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Vizzier, Let Me Speak! Testi­

mony o f Domitila, a Woman o f the Bolivian Mines (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1978).
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxxi

more seriously the phenomena of patriarchal power in the country

and their connection to the structures of internal colonialism that
persisted after national independence.12 Truly decolonized and
democratized social relations in the nation would entail, to draw
from only one aspect of Riveras work, a challenge to the political cul­
ture of male authority found widely across class and ethnic lines.
Likewise, Rossana Barragâns historical work on the principle of
patria potestad reveals how gender exclusions, alongside ethnic ones,
were built into liberal legislation regarding citizenship in the nine­
teenth century.13After prison and after her phase of social-movement
activism and participation in the Comuna group, Raquel Gutiérrez
returned to Mexico where her Bolivian experience has continued to
influence her thinking about masculinist logics in politics and the
role of women in creating the material and affective conditions for
communal action.14Considering such a range of historical and con­
temporary examples, future reflection on a truly emancipatory pro­
ject in the country—whether identified as national-popular or
not—can be tested by its confrontation of patriarchal hierarchy and
its openness to the constitutive social roles and political initiatives
of women.
j
:

12 For a sample of her work, see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Anticolonialism as

a Planetary Struggle, forthcoming in the Elsewhere Texts series from Seagull
Books.
13 Rossana Barragán, Indios, mujeres y ciudadanos. Legislación y ejercicio de
la ciudadanía en Bolivia (siglo XIX) (La Paz: Fundación Diálogo/Embajada
del Reino de Dinamarca en Bolivia, 1999).
14 See, for example, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Desandar el laberinto. Intro­
spección en la feminidad contemporánea (La Paz: Comuna, 1999); and her
‘Políticas en feminino: Transformaciones y subversiones no centradas en el
estado* in Horizontes comunitario-populares. Producción de lo común más allá
de las políticas estado-céntricas (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2017).
xxxii # SINCLAIR THOMSON

V
Zavaletas book can be seen as part of a long current within Marxism
in which grounded historical-political analysis has served as the basis
for elaboration of key conceptual categories. Marx’s 18th Brumaire
and Gramsci’s ‘Notes on Italian History’ are two preeminent exam­
ples. The connections between Zavaleta and Gramsci’s historical
writing go beyond the general inspiration that the latter provided or
Zavaletas specific redeployment of some of his language and
inquiries. There is the fact that Gramsci was himself writing from
the southern periphery of European capitalism in the early twentieth
century. There is also the similar truncation and open-endedness of
their projects. The very incompleteness of Gramsci’s work left it open
to multiple readings and appropriations, like those made by Zavaleta
himself. By the same token, if Zavaletas life was cut off before his
project had come to fruition, it allowed for a subsequent generation
to pick up the themes and pursue the implications under new his­
torical circumstances.
France in 1848 or Italy during the Risorgimento might be some­
what familiar to an international readership, perhaps in part thanks
to Marx and Gramsci themselves. For an audience unversed in
Bolivian, Peruvian and Chilean history, one of the challenges of
reading Zavaletas final work is its level of historical specificity. Such
readers are advised to consult Anne Freeland’s afterword to this book
which provides a concise overview of the historical processes exam­
ined by Zavaleta.
We might draw an additional comparison here between Zavaletas
methodological approach to Bolivian history and Gramsci’s approach
to subaltern history. Like social historians in the present, Gramsci
was aware of the difficulty of writing the history of subaltern social
groups (and hence of Italian history as a whole). Given their relative
lack of consolidation within the state and the corresponding limits
to the accessibility of their experience for the researcher, any attempt
to write subaltern history would inevitably be fragmentary and
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION • xxxiii

episodic. Zavaleta similarly saw that, given the degree of disarticu­

lation or abigarramiento in Bolivia, the writing of its history would
be necessarily sketchy, disjointed, discontinuous. His methodological
solution was to focus on crises as moments of revelation of society
(and hence the state): ‘Moments of crisis operate not as a form of vio­
lence against the routine order, but as a pathetic manifestation of the
points within society that would otherwise remain submerged and
gelatinous.’15 Gramsci drew the conclusion that subaltern history
could only be written monographically, pulling together a mass of
material not always easily accessible.16Zavaleta himself embarked on
an equivalent monographic project, fully cognizant of the limits of
his sources and his own historical knowledge. The result is not the
smooth, homogenized product that passes for standard academic or
successful commercial history, nor was it intended to be.
If Gramsci s writing was indirect and coded to guard it from the
prison censors, the gnomic language, cryptic style and dense com­
position in Zavaleta flowed from other sources. Luis Tapia describes
his vigorous, creative form as a Baroque-modernist expression cor­
responding to the very heterogeneity of the society that Zavaleta
sought to apprehend and from which his own knowledge derived.
Reflecting the society itself, argues Tapia, Zavaletas writing is marked
by manifold proliferating nuclei that lack an ultimately unified over­
arching frame and that spill over their own margins. Zavaletas com­
ment on crisis methodology might be extended to apply as well to
literary approaches, and be taken as implicitly self-referential: ‘Crit­
ical knowledge, as a result of the agglutinated form of heterogeneous
presentation within that pathos, is proper to unquantifiable societies

15 See p. 17 in the present volume. Pathos in Zavaleta concerns the affective

dimension in collective identity formation.
16 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks o f Antonio Gramsci
(Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds and trans) (New York: Inter­
national Publishers, 1971), pp. 52-5.
xxxiv • SINCLAIR THOMSON XXXIV

such as Bolivia.’17 By such a reading, Zavaletas own literary bid could

be seen as an effort, from a subjective and affective stance of revolu­
tionary commitment, to approximate a composite synthesis of the
disconnected elements of Bolivian history. His style is closer to essay
than tract, resistant to schematic systematization, experimental more
than conclusive, given to concentrated aphorism and assertion rather
than evenly proportioned exposition. His peculiar language seems
deliberately designed to contravene academic, technical or bureau­
cratic norms. The difficulties of Zavaletas writing are notorious for
his readers and might seem to pose an insuperable obstacle for trans­
lation, yet Freeland has met the challenges admirably in her elegant
and scrupulous English translation. Her afterword also provides a
glossary of a set of Zavaletas key categories.
Finally, it must be said that this superficial sketch of Zavaletas
intellectual project cannot do justice to its complexity and depth. For
an enhanced appreciation, the essential reference is the deep study
of Luis Tapia, the masterful interpreter of Zavaleta and his foremost
successor in Bolivian political theory.18 Zavaleta is known primarily
in Bolivian and Bolivianist circles, where his thinking has circulated
and been absorbed in the social sciences, history and cultural studies
as well as in public discourse. Yet, even his prominent position as
director of the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO)
in Mexico City did not lead to the international theoretical notoriety
that might be expected for someone of his intellectual calibre and
originality. Zavaleta has remained an intriguing figure but often an
unread or underestimated author even in the Latin American con­
text. It is to be hoped that this translation of Towards a History of the

17 See p. 17n2 in the present volume.

18 Luis Tapia, La producción del conocimiento local. Historia y política en René
Zavaleta Mercado (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2002). An English translation
of this work is forthcoming in the Elsewhere Texts series from Seagull Books
as The Production o f Local Knowledge: History and Politics in the Work o f René
Zavaleta Mercado.
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DETERMINATION * xxxv

National-Popular in Bolivia may spur reflection on the problems of

state-society relations and hegemonic and counter-hegemonic pro­
jects in different social formations around the world in which the
effects of capitalist development, however striking in some spheres,
however pervasive in others, remain only partial and uneven. His
final work-in-progress may also signal an avenue for producing crit­
ical theory from the global South and capitalist peripheries that is
historically informed and politically engaged as well as conscious of
and building from its own limits.
 Prologue

I. Introduction

The problem that this study seeks to investigate is that of the forma­
tion of the national-popular in Bolivia, that is, the connection
between what Max Weber called social democratization*1 and state
form. By this we mean the different patterns of socialization as they
existed and their indices of power, as well as the so-called mass pro­
jects. In other words, the relation between programme and reality.
Our study of this problem will refer to the period between 1952 and

[The text of Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia was unfinished when René

Zavaleta Mercado died. There was to be at least one more chapter, and he
wrote footnotes only for the prologue and the first chapter, inserting asterisks
in the text where there would have been footnotes in the second and third
chapters. The first Spanish edition (Mexico City: Siglo XX, 1986) included
the asterisks as in the manuscript without further citations. The second and
most recent Spanish edition (La Paz: Plural, 2013), thoroughly revised to cor­
rect transcription errors in the first, omits the asterisks and includes footnotes
with references for works cited in the second and third chapters, compiled by
Mauricio Souza. I am deeply indebted to Souza as I have reproduced almost
all of these, with m inor modifications. References from Souzas edition have
been omitted in a few cases where a particular text is cited as the source of a
concept that is generally well known and present in multiple works of a par­
ticular author or discourse, and in most cases of texts in Spanish translation,
I have changed the reference to either the original or an existing English trans­
lation. A few explanatory footnotes are mine, marked by brackets.—Trans.)

1 See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline o f Interpretive Sociology

(Guenther Roth and Clauss Wittich eds; Ephraim Fischoff, Hans Gerth and A.
M. Henderson trans) (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978). Weber uses
this term in the sense of the concrete process of equality, that is, of the produc­
tion of juridically free men, as opposed to democracy as political system.
2 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

1980, although its causal explanation will bring us back to the War
of the Pacific (1879-84).2 It should be understood as a general argu­
ment about the Bolivian social formation, empirically supported by
data from the period. From a methodological perspective, we will
proceed by isolating certain events, circumscribed in time, or
regional situations, circumscribed in space. This is a response to a
scarcity of information and it undoubtedly entails a symbolic selec­
tion. In defence of this method it must be said that no social science
is possible otherwise in a country like Bolivia.

II. Background

The phase known as that of the National Revolution, which unfolds

around the moment of rupture of 1952,3 is at the centre of our anal­
ysis because it constitutes an organic development: latent elements
are suddenly compelled to perform a radical act of manifestation or
appearing, and it is here that it becomes evident, for example, that
the category of marginality, perhaps valid as a quantitative criterion
within a moment of gnomic subordination, is nonetheless not at all
valid in a moment of critical revelation.4

2 In 1952, a popular insurrection instituted the current Bolivian state model.

The War of the Pacific, with Chile on one side and Peru and Bolivia on the
other, involved a displacement of the logic of protectionism with regard to
the towns of the interior in favour of the mercantile logic of the peripheral
ports. It is the starting point of the oligarchic state in Bolivia.
3 The ‘National Revolution in Bolivia refers to the period of democratic trans­
form ations that began in April 1952. The term is attributed to Carlos M on­
tenegro, the foremost theorist of revolutionary nationalism, and it indicates
in a way the privilege that tends to be afforded to national objectives over
democratic ones. ‘Not to be like those who feel themselves to be a class rather
than nation,’ he writes.
4 For the role of crisis in social knowledge, see René Zavaleta Mercado,
‘M ovimiento obrero y ciencia social: La revolución democrática de 1952 en
Bolivia y las tendencias sociológicas emergentes’, Historia y Sociedad: Revista
Latinoamericana de Pensamiento Marxista (Mexico) 2(3) (1974): 3-35. Also
in Obra completa de René Zavaleta Mercado (La Paz: Plural, 2011-15) vol. 1,
 PROLOGUE • 3

Since this moment is characterized by a hierarchical fluidity or

void, there is in effect a mode of identification that each of the social
classes adopts in relation to the new general articulation, in relation
to one another,5and also to the state, which does not merely receive
the consequences of this interaction but also contrives to test its own
nascent autonomy amid a set of events that can only be construed as
a typical constitutive moment.6
In a way, the subsequent history of Bolivia is but the unravelling
of the elements of the crisis of 1952. Thereafter, the class subjects
only reproduce the conditions of their performance at that crucial
moment. This of course leads us to consider the singular role of
catastrophic or constitutive moments in relation to the reformulation
of ideological models and also of what we might call the ‘tempera­
ment’ of a society. The inquiry itself should tell us if this is a way of
compensating for imbalances or disjunctions between silent struc­
tural events and the constitution of power, that is: In what way does
a society that is to a great extent invertebrate like that of Bolivia coor­
dinate the moments of its determination, given that here this could
not be done by means of representative democracy?7

pp. 691-726. See also Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Clase y conocimiento’ Historia y

Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana de Pensamiento Marxista (Mexico) 2(7)
(1975): 3-8; Obra completa, VOL 2, pp. 383-9.
5 It is obvious, for example, that the peasants are formally organized in the
image of the workers, yet this does not create a relation of immersion in the
working class but in the state from which the working class had operated.
Other movements within the hegemonic exchange that is active beginning in
1952 include the particular mode of association between the military and the
peasantry, and between the students and the workers.
6 A constitutive moment’ can be understood as the originary point of a society
in the most remote sense, for example, the irrigation of the Nile in Egypt, or
the conquest of the elements in the Andes. In the sense in which we are using
it, it refers to the manner of acquisition of the ideological tone and the forms
of domination adopted by the state, that is, the moment of its construction.
7 See René Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Cuatro conceptos de la democracia’, Bases:
Expresiones del pensamiento marxista boliviano 1 (1981): 101-24; Dialéctica
4 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

The period itself, understood as a revolutionary period, is thor­

oughly illustrative of the contents of each of the social classes and
their ‘national’ scope. The reorganization of the relations between
the new political classes (the working class and the peasantry) and
the mediations that were established almost as if to reconnoiter the
situation8 necessitated the founding of a new state system that we
will call the state of 1952. It inaugurates the second phase of the Boli­
vian state in the twentieth century.9
The first had been established with the Federal War (1899). An
alliance between the oligarchic subclass and the indigenous peas­
antry imposed then, by military' means, a new dominant social bloc,
a new geopolitical axis, certainly new principles of legitimation and,
to a great extent, even a new repressive apparatus, all this within the
context of Bolivia’s new mode of insertion into the world market with
the tin mines.10
The structural composition of the state of 1952 is based on the
expansion of the demographic base of political consensus (which had
collapsed as a result of liberal defection in 1899) through the inclusion
of the workers in the political sphere in the 1940s and of the peasantry
in the 1950s, on a new spatial conception of the country’ (although
spatiality is a constant in the reasoning of the Bolivian state),11 a new

7(12) (September 1982): 11-30; Obra completa, YOL. 2, pp. 513-29; ‘De Banzer
a Guevara Arze: la fuerza de la masa, Cuadernos de Marcha (Mexico) 2(3)
(Septem ber-October 1979): 29-41; Obra completa, YOL. 2, pp. 471-93.
8 See Zavaleta, ‘Movimiento obrero y ciencia social ’ The conduct o f the peas­
ant leaders in relation to the guerrilla of 1967 is especially eloquent. See René
Zavaleta Mercado, ‘El Che en el Churo’, Semanario Marcha (Mexico), 10 O cto­
ber 1969, pp. 16-18; subsequently published in Temas Sociales 7 (1971): 10-
22; Obra completa, VOL 2, pp. 621-32.
9 See note 41.
10 See Ramiro Condarco Morales, Zárate, el temible Willka: Historia de la
rebelión indígena de 1899 (La Paz: Talleres Gráficos Bolivianos, 1965).
11 See Carlos Badía Malagrida, El factor geográfico en la política sudamericana
(Madrid: Reus, 1946); Jaime Mendoza, El macizo boliviano (La Paz: Imp. Am ó
hnos., 1935), etc.
 PROLOGUE • 5

ideology (the ‘ideologeme of revolutionary nationalism),12and a new

repressive apparatus. More important than all of this, however, is the
emergence of structures of mediation and mediators in a modern
sense.13 A comparative analysis of the constitution, the forms and the
decline of the two Bolivian states (of these two phases) serves as a
valuable frame for the study of Latin American social formations. In
other words, this study is intended as an intervention in the recent
debates on the problem of the state on the basis of the analysis of a
concrete case.14
If it is obvious that the revolutionary event is not the result of
direct economic determination but of class accumulation, we can
nonetheless infer connections between elements belonging to the offi­
cial country and those of its inner nature. None of the moments
proper to the state mode of 1952, some of which constitute absolute
shifts with regard to the entire history of the country (such as the
definitive incorporation of the peasantry),15would have been possible

12 See Luis H. Antezana Juárez, ‘Sistema y proceso ideológicos en Bolivia,

1935-1979’ in René Zavaleta Mercado (ed.), Bolivia hoy (Mexico City:
Siglo XXI, 1983), pp. 60-84; Ernesto Laclau, Política e ideología en la teoría
marxista: capitalismo, fascismo, populismo (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1978).
Juan Lechín, for example, was the classic mediator throughout the period.
But so, in a way, was Alfredo Ovando in relation to the army. The advent of
what has been called ‘mediation through privilege (see Zavaleta, ‘De Banzer
a Guevara Arze’; Walter Guevara Arze, ‘Los militares en Bolivia [unpublished
manuscript, 1980]), on the other hand, is characteristic of the moment of
decline of the state of 1952.
14 See Ernesto Ayala Mercado, ¿Qué es la Revolución Boliviana? (La Paz:
Talleres Burillo, 1956); Guillermo Lora, La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico
(La Paz: Difusión, 1964). For the general problem, see Biaggio de Giovanni,
‘Crisis orgánica y Estado en Gramsci’ in Giacomo M arramao et al., Teoría
marxista de la política (Mexico City: Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente, 1981);
Giuseppe Vacca, ‘Form a-stato y forma-valore in Louis Althusser et al.,
Discutere lo Stato: Posizioni a confronto su una tesi di Louis Althusser (Bari:
De Donato, 1978).
15 See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Apuntes para la historia de las luchas
campesinas en Bolivia (1900-1978)’ in Pablo González Casanova (ed.),
6 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

without certain precursory events like the Chaco War.16War is always

a force of renewal in societies and not for nothing has it been said
that it is the way in which nations progress. We must nonetheless
consider the function of a more or less universal mobilization in a
country that lacked truly national events.17The role of modern war­
fare as a sociological event of great pathetic intensity in the transfor­
mation of social classes is clearly evident (for example, the emergence
of a state pathos within the military), but, above all, in the prepara­
tion for depeasantization and certainly as an arena of ideological
nationalization. The relation between military mobilization and the
peasant movement now seems easily demonstrable.18
In fact, the social catastrophe of 1952 itself suggests heterodox
positions with regard to the most representative sociological litera­
ture in Latin America, at least that of recent years. It is claimed, for
example, that we are dealing with a social formation whose character
is determined by its marginality and dependency.19 In principle, we
are compelled here to abandon a purely statistical analysis. The ample
participation of the peasantry in the implementation of the process

Historia política de los campesinos latinoamericanos, vol . 3 (Mexico City: Siglo

XXI, 1985).
16 See David H. Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War (New York: Bookman
Associated, 1961); Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay: historia política,
diplomática y militar de la Guerra del Chaco (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro,
1975); Aquiles Vergara Vicuña, Historia de la Guerra del Chaco (La Paz:
Litografía e Imprenta Unidas, 1940-44).
17 The same can be said of the mobilizations that took place during the period
of the rise of the masses after 1952: here the mobilization itself has a validity
independent of its proportions; that is, what is irreversible is the act of the
masses and not its scale.
18 See Jorge Dandler, El sindicalismo campesino en Bolivia: Los cambios estruc­
turales en Ucureña (Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1969).
19 See Aníbal Quijano, Dependencia, urbanización y cambio social en Latino­
américa (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1977). Also, Ministerio de Planificación
y Coordinación, Estrategia socioeconómica de desarrollo nacional, 1971-1991
(La Paz: M inisterio de Planificación y Coordinación 1970).
 PROLOGUE • 7

of agrarian reform (in certain regions in particular) proves that the

quantitative criterion of marginality is too reductive.20 As for the
structure of dependency, it is clear that if we were to adhere strictly
to this principle, we would have to understand history as a closed
circle in which the dependent could produce nothing but depen­
dency: there would be no national histories. It is obvious that there
are non-dependent forms of articulation, that the metropole itself
faces great obstructions with regard to its capacity for knowledge of
dependent societies. The nucleus of 1952 reveals a significant degree
of political self-determination in a very backward context,21 although
this self-propulsion gave way almost immediately to the coercion of
external conditions.22
In any case, it seems that in the interpretations of these events
that have been advanced until now, there has been a certain
Manichaeism, that is, they have almost always lacked what is called
a ‘total perspective’. The various factors tend to be subordinated
either to the existence of a political caucus (the MNR) or to the
undoubtedly impressive actions of the working class, not to mention
explanations that emphasize the role of charismatic leadership.23 It

20 This is evident in the events of Sacaba, Tolata and Epinaza in 1974 and the
great peasant movement in support of the workers strike of November 1979.
21 We know, for example, that US diplomats were sure in March 1952 that
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Move­
ment, MNR) would never rise to power, when an insurrection would erupt
just days later. With Sergio Almaraz, I was able to see correspondence on this
matter in the archive at the Calvo office in La Paz.
22 See Jackson Eder, in his memoirs, cited in Laurence Whitehead, The United
States and Bolivia: A Case o f Neo-colonialism (Oxford: Haslemere, 1969) and
Victor Andrade, M y Missions fo r Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1962 (Pitts­
burgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).
23 See Herbert S. Klein, Orígenes de la revolución nacional boliviana: La crisis
de la generación del Chaco (La Paz: Juventud, 1968); Liborio Justo, Bolivia: La
revolución derrotada (Buenos Aires: Juárez Editor, 1971); Luis Peñaloza, His­
toria del Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: 1941-1952 (La Paz: Direc­
ción Nacional de Informaciones, 1963).
8 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

is more profitable, in our view, to discern instead the contradictory

development of the different factors, as if the subjects of this history
intended one thing and the course of events led ineluctably else­
where. Jacobinism here turned out to be an ineffective school of
thought. The idea of the peasantry as a class that receives and the
proletariat as the class that gives, for example, merely follows a dog­
matic line. In reality, there is every reason to believe that the peas­
antry had its own class accumulation and also, as it were, its own
class history within the history of classes. It is significant that it serves
successively as a hegemonic mass at the moment of the constitution
of power,24 as a conservative body throughout the so-called military
-peasant pact, when it was considered a ‘peaceful class’ and, finally,
as the site of the disaggregation of the class bloc of 1952, that is, of
the dissolution of the state.25
The Bolivian working class, in its history as a constitutive class
and as a separatist class, has consistently put into question the degree
to which we can say that there is in Bolivia, and, in all likelihood,
anywhere else, a necessary correspondence between the indices of
economic and cultural development and the level of political devel­
opment of the workers. The Bolivian experience seems to show, as
do other cases, that this correlation is at best indirect, so that for a
class like this, its own organic accumulation or hegemonic history,
something that is necessarily related to the degree of efficiency
achieved by the state presence, is of greater importance.26

24 It was surely the success of the peasant mobilization that ensured the sur­
vival of the MNRs power in the critical years of 1952-56.
25 The substitution of the ‘m ilitary-peasant pact’ by an alliance between the
peasantry and the COB towards 1978 and the support of the UDP in the three
elections that Siles Zuazo won between 1978 and 1980.
26 See Juan Rojas and June C. Nash, He agotado mi vida en la mina: Una his­
toria de vida (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1976); Domitila Barrios de C hun­
gara and M oema Viezzer (eds), *Si me permiten hablar: Testimonio de
Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977),
available in English as: Let Me Speak! Testimony o f Domitila, a Woman o f the
 PROLOGUE • 9

But this apparent margin of autonomous political development

proved valid only in a less perspicuous way for other sectors.
Scant economic development was not a real obstacle for the devel­
opment of the working class, but it probably was an obstacle for the
formation of a local bourgeoisie. In other words, while the peasants
demonstrated an almost general capacity for mobilization (for non-
marginality) and the workers for what was practically an impromptu
hegemony, to a remarkable extent on the Latin American scale, at
the same time the ‘seigneurial paradox’ emerges. What do we mean
by this? The old Bolivian class or caste proves incapable of gathering
within itself any of the subjective or material conditions of its trans­
formation into a modern bourgeoisie, perhaps because it is a bour­
geoisie that lacks bourgeois ideals, or because all of its cultural
structures are of a precapitalist order. The paradox consists in that
at the same time it possesses an extraordinary capacity for self­
ratification qua dominant class throughout the different phases of
the state, through immense social changes, and even several modes
of production. Thus, just as the National Revolution is something
like a bourgeois revolution carried out against the bourgeoisie, its
development is the placing of its elements in the service of a reposi­
tioning of the oligarchic-seigneurial class. This seigneurial orienta­
tion, then, proves to be a constant throughout the history of Bolivia.27

Bolivian Mines (New York; M onthly Review Press, 1978); Carlos Soria
Galvarro, Con la revolución en las venas: Los mineros de Siglo XX en la resisten­
cia antifascista (La Paz: Editorial Roalva, 1980).
27 See Gonzalo Romero, Reflexiones para una interpretación de la historia de
Bolivia (Buenos Aires; Imprenta López, 1960); Jorge Siles Salinas, ‘Reflexiones
sobre la ejemplaridad* in Lecciones de una revolución: Bolivia, 1952-1959 (San­
tiago: Editorial Universidad Católica, 1959), pp. 27-36; Marcelo Quiroga
Santa Cruz, La victoria de abril sobre la nación (La Paz: Burillo, 1964); Jorge
Siles Salinas, La aventura y el orden: reflexiones sobre la revolución boliviana
(Santiago: Bustos y Letelier, 1956).
10 # REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

III. Some Hypotheses on the Subject

In short, our intention is to apply concepts from state theory and

from a theory of social classes to a study of a concrete, historical
nature centred on the preliminary hypotheses or postulations out­
lined below:

1. The Relation between Surplus and Constitutive Moment

The role of social ‘receptivity* as the basis of the formation of modern
states is more or less generally accepted. This receptivity or general
opening refers, with regard to civil society, to moments of emptying,
that is, to the conjunctures in which great masses are prepared to
assume new collective beliefs.28 From the perspective of the state,
however, this ‘receptivity’ is clearly related to the problem of economic
surplus, that is, a haphazard malleability of the masses is not enough,
but, rather, a degree of capacity for emission or infusion is necessary
on the part of the state, of power as a programmatic act. There is a
parallel development: the deeper the ‘receptivity’ of society as ideo­
logical flux and the greater the surplus, the better the conditions for
the construction of a modern state, that is, one in which ideological
inflection predominates over the repressive fact and democratic medi­
ations replace or mask traditional forms of domination.29
In Bolivia, there have been at least two constitutive moments in
the period that interests us here: 1899 and 1952. The extent and
depth of each of these is a matter of debate. That of 1899 had national
consequences, but it was not a truly ‘national’ event and ultimately
it translated for the most part into shifts of power within the dom i­
nant social bloc. Even the participation of the Aymara occasioned,

28 This notion of ‘emptying’ is really a metaphor, but it is clear that ideology

is a thing of great tenacity and that only in very exceptional moments are peo­
ple open to such a substitution.
29 See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in ‘Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 127-
88; Claus Offe, ‘The Abolition of Market Control and the Problem of Legiti­
macy’, Kapitalistate 1-2 (1973-74): 109-16.
 PROLOGUE • II

above all, the establishment of what has been called ‘social Darwinism’
as the internal ideology of the oligarchic state.30This is of course not
the same thing as a democratic revolution in which great masses are
active and take up arms, those in which military action is more or
less global, such as the Mexican Revolution, or insurrections like that
of Bolivia in 1952 that are concretized in a concentrated nucleus
which later distributes its revolutionary effects, only after these have
been mediated by ideological subsumption, etc.31 In any case, even
if we accept such objections, we would have to speak in terms of a
lack of extension or depth of these constitutive moments, but not of
their nonexistence. It is clear that the course of Bolivian history pre­
pared the way for this type of innovation.
Here the explanation of the weak constitution of the nation-state
on the basis of a supposed lack of economic surplus is an unfortunate
commonplace.32 Bolivia would never have had the articulatory eco­
nomic capacity required to produce more advanced institutions. This
would not explain, on the other hand, why countries like Cuba in
the 1920s and Argentina during the half century that spans from
1880 to 1930 failed nonetheless, as did Bolivia, in the construction
of modern political superstructures.
In the nineteenth century, Bolivia disappears from the world mar­
ket for all practical purposes.33 A state apparatus is then organized

30 See Marie-Danielle Démêlas, Nationalisme sans nation? La Bolivie aux

XIX e-X X e siècles (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1980); Bautista Saavedra,
‘Proceso Mohoza: Defensa del abogado pronunciada en la audiencia del 12
de octubre de 190T in El ayllu: Estudios sociológicos (La Paz: Juventud, 1971),
pp. 133-56.
31 See René Zavaleta Mercado, El poder dual en América Latina: Estudios de
los casos de Bolivia y Chile (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1974).
32 See Walter Guevara Arze, Plan inmediato de política económica del
gobierno de la Revolución Nacional (La Paz: Letras, 1955) and all of Paz
Estenssoros speeches on 1952.
33 See Luis Peñaloza, Historia económica de Bolivia (La Paz: El Progreso,
1953).
12 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

with an economy founded almost exclusively upon what is called

indigenous tribute.34 This institution is perhaps the most worthy of
study in relation to the Bolivian social formation: it refers in principle
to a ‘tributary’ sector but not to a constituent’ sector. With various
modifications, this would continue to be the case until well into the
twentieth century; but the character or spirit of the material base of
the state, its ‘structural conception’, would not change until 1952 and
even then it would retain substantial residual tendencies.
The appropriation of the surplus has always been an alien con­
cept for the Bolivian ruling class, and this was the case during the
two silver booms as well as the tin boom.35 In other words, we must
review the conditions as a result of which Bolivia was unable to
absorb its surplus, but the claim that no surplus existed is clearly
untenable.

2. Conservative Aspects of the Seigneurial Paradox and the Agrarian

Question
If we bear in mind the dramatic universality of the events of 1952
and of several other contiguous events,36 the seigneurial reconstruc­
tion of the ruling class in the subsequent period is all the more sur­
prising. This is what we have called the problem of the seigneurial

34 See Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Tributo abolido, tributo repuesto: Invari­

antes socioeconómicas en la Bolivia republicana in Tulio Halperín Donghi
(comp.), El ocaso del orden colonial en Hispanoamérica (Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana, 1978), pp. 159-200; Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘A puntes para la his­
toria de las luchas campesinas en Bolivia.
35 See Antonio Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata: Estructura socioeconómica de
la minería boliviana en el siglo X IX (Lima: IEP, 1981); Juan Albarracín
Millán, El poder minero en la administración liberal, vol . 1 (La Paz: Urquizo,
1972); Sergio Almaraz, El poder y la caída: El estaño en la historia de Bolivia
(La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1967); Jan Kñakal, Vinculaciones de las empre­
sas transnacionales con la industria del estaño en Bolivia (Santiago: CEPAL,
1981).
36 See note 25.
 PROLOGUE • 13

paradox in the history of Bolivia.37 It is a feature of the traditionalism

that Bolivian society exhibits in contrast to others of great dynamism
and initiative, and it is likely (though this remains to be proven) that
it has to do with the semicrystallized state of the agrarian question.
Although this is a far more complex problem and anything we might
say about it here would entail a measure of audacity, there are certain
apothegms within the discourse of social analysis in Bolivia that
should be pointed out. We could say in general that there has been,
from a schematic perspective, a difference between the juridical
moment of taxation or tribute and the structural moment of produc­
tion, that is, that the juridical forms of the agrarian question have
been conflated with the practical models of agricultural appropria­
tion of the land, which is, in our view, where the crux of matter lies.
This is perhaps already evident in the persistence of the agrarian
form of the community,’ given that the defence and reproduction of
this form in practice constitutes the mode of insertion of the peas­
antry in the democratic movement.38 But despite the apparent forms
of the haciendas and even smallholdings, at least as far as the classical
Andean habitat is concerned, it is clear that it is merely a matter of
juridical modalities in which the model of production is maintained;
in other words, there is ultimately a single agricultural form that has
persisted over time. The Spaniard, the hacendado, the civil servant,
would serve as state mediators or tax collectors but never as admin­
istrators in the sphere of production; that is to say, there would be a
juridical subsumption but never a real subsumption.39

37 See note 27.

38 Erwin Grieshaber, ‘Survival of Indian Communities in Nineteenth-
Century Bolivia’ (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
1977); Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘A puntes para la historia de las luchas campesinas
en Bolivia’.
39 See E. Boyd Wennergren and Morris D. Whitaker, The Status o f Bolivian
Agriculture (New York: Praeger, 1975).
14 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

This hypothesis, although certainly belied by patent instances of

privatization of communal lands, of inter-peasant economic accu­
mulation and of differentiation (and unification), nonetheless exerts
a certain influence that compels us to test it. In any case, the resis­
tance of the Andean agrarian civilization would dem onstrate the
impenetrability of this universe to the interpellation of a nondemo-
cratic state and the incompatibility of the seigneurial elite with demo­
cratic legitimation. That this is still true in the present conjuncture
is evident, for example, in the striking resonance between Tamayos
ideas in 1910 and the millenarian project of the contemporary
Katarists.40

3. Problems of Theoretical Formalization

This period of Bolivian history presents interesting problems for its
theoretical formalization. This is the case, for example, with regard
to those questions related to the stability or instability of the power
system, the role of representative democracy and authoritarianism
and, finally, the originary formation of the organs of power.
Bolivia has known two periods of civilian representative-
democratic stability (1899-1934 and 1952-1964) and two phases of
military rule (1934-1946 and 1964).41 In general, Bolivia is known
as a country of political instability. We must, however, account for
why in the first period of civilian stability there was sufficient legit­
imacy despite minimal electoral participation, why in the second a

40 See Franz Tamayo, Creación de la pedagogía nacional (La Paz: Biblioteca

del Sesquicentenario de Bolivia, 1975(1910]); Gamaliel Churata, El pez de oro:
Retablos del Laykhakuy (La Paz: Canata, 1957); Fausto Reinaga, La revolución
india (La Paz: Partido Indio de Bolivia, 1969).
41 The liberal period, strictly speaking, only lasts until 1920, but the subse­
quent republican governments were ultimately a continuation of this period.
From 1952 to 1964, the MNR governed through a peaceful succession of
elected civilian adm inistrations. The first period of m ilitary governm ent
begins with Toro (1934) and ends with Ballivián (1952). But this is too formal
a classification.
 PROLOGUE • 15

much more extensive sphere of legitimation was required, and why

after this second period not even the complete universalization of
suffrage was a sufficient legitimating element. This has to do with
the perception of the masses, which is to say, in this study a double
perspective is sought: first, how things occurred in the complexity
of their contents; second, the way in which they were recognized and
internalized by the masses. Why, for example, in the eyes of the col­
lectivity, Busch or Villarroel represented democratic periods and not
Herzog or Barrientos is a question that has to do with the history of
the perspective of the masses.42
Consequently, with regard to representative democracy, the fol­
lowing problems, among others, will be addressed: the problem of
the territorial axis, that is, Bolivia’s failure to establish such an axis,
even when it expressly attempted to do so with the Federal Revolu­
tion. There is no Piedmont or Buenos Aires in Bolivia.43 But the
social topography itself is irregular. It is more important to know the
result of an election in the three main cities, in the mining centres
and in two or three peasant districts than in the country as a whole.44
This suggests that representative democracy, in order to be effective,
requires a degree of homogeneity that Bolivia does not have. There­
fore, the site of the ‘nucleus of good sense’ of legitimacy must be
negotiated because, on the other hand, it is clear that representative
democracy at a certain point becomes a popular demand.
The same can be said of the paradigm of the political party or
the union. Bolivian society has been capable of building a party sys­
tem since 1880 and has generated at least one party on the scale of

42 See René Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Bolivia: Algunos problemas acerca de la

democracia, el movimiento popular y la crisis revolucionaria in René Zavaleta
Mercado (ed.), América Latina 80: Democracia y movimiento popular (Lima:
DESCO, 1981), pp. 39-61.
43 Although the Federal Revolution was a frustrated attempt to give the
departm ent of La Paz the role of Piedmont.
44 To capture La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, plus the mining districts
and peasant towns like Cliza and Achacachi, is to capture all of Bolivia.
16 • 3HNE ZAVALSTA MERC a DO

die strongest in the region. Our task, however, is not to investigate

wnar is called a party, which is basically a social bloc, but w'hat it
means in relation its original model, which is the European party.
“Tie same goes for the decisive history of the unions. If the union is
die organization proper to the free circulation of labour power, we
a m * as* what its function was prior to the full freedom of the market
die union preceded the internal market) or, rather, how alienation
i r iepeasanrizanon was the mode of its constitution.
I

CHAPTER ONE

The Struggle for the Surplus

‘In short, one has to make an outline of the whole history of

Italy—in synthesis, but accurate.’1

Crisis can be understood in general as an anomalous instant in the

life of a society, as a moment when things appear not as they are
experienced in the quotidian but as they truly are. Yet, if the quan­
tification of society is possible only through capitalism disseminated
as a general form, and although certainly there is not a single way of
knowing each thing, crisis acquires a special connotation in relation
to those societies like the Bolivian that are incalculable and incog­
nizable. Each mode of being necessarily engenders a form of knowl­
edge, and therefore we maintain that it would be wrong to speak of
a general method of knowing common to all societies.2 In this society
specifically, moments of crisis operate not as a form of violence
against the routine order, but as a pathetic manifestation of the points
within society that would otherwise remain submerged and gelati­
nous. Quantification itself, as we shall see throughout this history,
plays a more limited part in more heterogeneous societies; on the
other hand, it is at the moment of crisis or its equivalent (a moment
---- -■-■ ■■'■- ■■■'—
1 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 131.
2 A general m ethod’ is at least as remote a possibility as is a general theory of
the state. Each society must identify the method that can refer or apply to it.
There are cognizable and incognizable societies, societies that are cognizable
in one way and societies cognizable in another; in short, quantifiable societies
and societies in which the m ode of articulation between different forms
is qualitative. Critical knowledge, as a result of the agglutinated form of
heterogeneous presentation within that pathos, is proper to unquantifiable
societies such as Bolivia. See René Zavaleta Mercado, Las masas en noviembre
(La Paz: Juventud, 1983).
i
1
li

V fI
18 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

of intensity) that, in its results or synthesis, for this constitutes the

only phase of concentration or centralization, a formation that oth­
erwise would appear only as an archipelago can be seen. If this is
true, it is not true in all cases, because not every crisis is generally
eloquent and here the degree of revelation is also proportional to the
degree of generality of the crisis, nor is quantification as such some­
thing that can be dispensed with altogether. The important thing is
that, sooner or later, each society learns that to know itself is almost
to prevail. The will to self-knowledge is not an insignificant phase of
existence. War, in turn, is an intense moment, but not every war is a
crisis and neither one nor the other encompasses in all cases the
whole of the social object. The history of these hundred years in
Bolivia will therefore necessarily be the history of a series of crises
or pathetic social agglutinations.
Now, if we were to distinguish between how the War of the
Pacific was experienced and how the Federal Revolution was expe­
rienced3 (by which we mean to refer not to the externality of these
events but to their collective internalization), we would have to say
that the former should be considered, strictly speaking (at least in its
initial moment), a matter of the state, that is, something won or lost
by the ruling class, since at that time this class was not differentiated
from the state4 as an entity accountable to itself. In its different
degrees of integration, a war can involve society and affect the state

3 In the War o f the Pacific, Chile fought against Peru and Bolivia between
1879 and 1884; the so-called Federal Revolution was a civil war between the
departm ents of the south, under the leadership of Chuquisaca, and those of
the north, basically La Paz. See Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka.
4 Although it had been at times, for example, with Santa Cruz. A true distinc­
tion between the government as apparatus and the ruling class does not for­
mally exist until the Revolution of 1952. Still, here we must take into account
the tendency of the state to return to society—as a result of its power, it returns
to society far stronger—and, conversely, the continuous impulse of every
aspect of society, but more forcefully of certain particular groups, towards the
state. The more or less prolonged stability of the state and of society is the
privilege of but few societies.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 19

only in a limited way, or it can be between a faction of society and

the state, or, finally, it can remain solely at the level of the state. We
maintain, then, that in the immediate ideological form it took when
it occurred, the War of the Pacific was an affair of the state and of
the state class, and not of society, at least not in any immediate way.
In what follows we shall see why. The Federal Revolution, on the
other hand, revealed the vital core of the paradigmatic conflicts of
civil society.5
This nomenclature (civil society, state) is not always con­
vincing. Especially in a country like that which Bolivia undoubtedly
was at the time, in which the relative separation of the state, its auton­
omy, had not yet been achieved in any way. What we call the state at
that time was rather the fraction of the ruling caste (because it was
hereditary) within civil society itself that took over the government
(here this expression, to take something over [hacerce de algo], must
be emphasized) in an arbitrary way, with a characteristic transience.
That is, this caste dominated continuously in civil society and inter­
mittently in government, alternating between its parties or factions.6
What in fact distinguishes Hilarión Daza from [Narciso] Campero,
or [Mariano] Melgarejo from the second Ballivián (who was his
child’s godfather)?7At best a difference in degree of legitimacy within
the ruling caste, which, after all, was important because one needs a

5 See the following chapter.

6 We should note, for example, the triviality of the skirmishes between Santa
Cruz’s and Ballivians factions, although the penetration of crucismo in bel-
cismo is indeed significant. In any case, the naturalness with which the con­
servative ruling class of Chuquisaca adapted to the ascendancy of the liberal
ruling class of La Paz indicates that the connections between the two were
considerable.
7 Manuel Rigoberto Paredes, Melgarejoy su tiempo (La Paz: Isla, 1962). Adolfo
Ballivian, indeed, had spoken to Melgarejo o f ‘the sincerity and tenderness of
my affection for your person in a letter dated 29 January 1863, in which he
also maintained that his decision would be carried out even if cherished and
sacred ties did not bind me to you’. Melgarejism was no doubt at least one side
of the oligarchic tradition and it was tied to the other, as this letter shows.
20 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

certain rational hereditary right even within a system of caste privi­

lege. The unity or division of the ruling class is always a decisive fac­
tor in the assessment of the state. In any case, that this caste should
admit almost indiscriminately its traditional heroes, such as [Jose]
Balliviân, or the enigmatic sort of a brutal charisma like Melgarejo,
is ultimately of little importance since either case constitutes only the
internal movements within a single class. Balliviân or [Tomas] Frias
represented at best a spurious proposition of the principle of the
rational constitution of power that [Mariano] Baptista or [Aniceto]
Arce would later practise inconsistently.8 The so-called Federal
War, on the other hand, is a far more profound event. It is the sum
of Melgarejo and [José Maria] Linares, of Daza and Balliviân that lost
the earlier war, that of the Pacific, whose significance Bolivia was
only belatedly able to discern.
And why, we might ask, did Bolivia take so long to take account
(to render account to itself) of what had happened? A people that
fails to recognize its own defeat is a people that is far from itself. The
indifference or perplexity with which this country dismissed an event
so decisive not only for its immediate being but also for all of its fore­
seeable future is indeed striking. The territorial loss represented an
indisputable defeat, the gravest and most decisive for the fate of
Bolivia. If we consider its most immediate implication, it can be said
that this rupture imposed a pseudo-autarchic future upon a country
ill-suited to autarchic development. The very heterogeneity of this
land reminds us perpetually that there is no homogeneity but that
imposed by history, that is, by men, through conscious and cumula­
tive acts. Only a certain penetrating contact with the world could
allow for some kind of surplus that might supply the no doubt costly
requirements of an articulation of the diversity that could only
convert the logos of the traditional space into a coherent national
market through a systematic programme. Here life is anything but

8 Joaquin de Lemoine, Biografia del general Eliodoro Camacho (Buenos Aires:

Peuser, 1885), cited in Alcides Arguedas, Historia general de Bolivia in Obras
completasy VOL. 2 (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1960).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS # 21

spontaneous action. Consequently, with scarcely a kind of abject

consciousness, Bolivia lost the possibility of developing a fluid and
self-determined relation to even a minimal extent (that is, in its non­
dependent territorial access) to a world market that, moreover, had
just then begun to set the foundations of what would become a global
economic system. Certainly the fetishization of this loss or failure
often functions as an ideological scapegoat to explain the inferiority
of the Bolivian nation, a common Jeremian refrain, as if to say, ‘Thus
began our misfortune.’ What we might call the model of success, that
is, the seductive effect of the fortunes of the core countries, operated
in the production of this exutory. England, therefore, from that so-
insular perspective, seemed to be the alliance of commerce and the
sea, which was moreover what a capitalist form whose only modality
of existence had always been commercial capital was prepared to
believe.9 The truth is that of these peoples of which Bolivia is made
up has always been an inland culture: it is not a culture that closed
itself off, but one that has constituted itself inwardly, which might
have something to do with a certain inclination towards historical
perseverance.10 Under no circumstances could Bolivia have become
a seafaring people and the conclusive nature of its dispossession shook
the formation in two ways. First, because in the era of the world mar­
ket, no country can acquire any degree of autonomy (and without
autonomy, that is, without a degree of self-determination that does not
impede its existence in the world, no nation can effectively be a nation)
except through exchange with it, that is, real autonomy consists in a
relation of belonging and at the same time of non-contingence vis-à-
vis the world. In other words, the least that can be said is that this
circumstance impeded Bolivia’s untethered emergence at a decisive
moment in the history of the world, a moment of such importance
that it could be said that not to have participated in it is also not to
know the world as it exists here and now. Bolivia became a tributary

9 Carlos Sempat Assadourian et al., Modos de producción en América Latina

(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1973).
10 Tamayo, Creación de la pedagogía nacional.
22 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

both to the metropolises of the world and to this now ineluctable

geographic mediation. It would be fair to say that from then on,
whatever surplus was produced11 had to contend not only with the
incapacity for absorption common to all the countries of Latin
America, but also with the logic of the two borders. Bolivia’s wealth,
still, besides its relatively modest scale, is internal. It is clear that
sovereign control of the port, or at least access to it, would not have
made it less so. Isolation merely exacerbated that which must of
necessity be the nature of any Bolivian project, that is, its non-referral
to any axis but its own. It is, then, a country that, although it must
take into account its mode of insertion into the world market, must
focus to a far greater extent than other countries on the self-referen­
tial aspects of its development. Indeed, there is no more absurd
method of knowing a social formation like that of Bolivia than
through indices with pretensions of general validity.
As we shall see, the spirits of the state in Bolivia could only see
the geography of the country from a gamonal12perspective. The tra­
ditional state form was that of gamonalism.13The territory, of course,
is an essential element of ideology, the nodal material support for
the way in which a people sees itself, and this is why the notion of
the nomadic or errant has such a pejorative connotation. The impor­
tant thing about the War of the Pacific, infinitely graver than the fact

11 Guevara Arze, Radiografía de la negociación con Chile (La Paz: Universo,

1978); Daniel Sánchez Bustamante, Bolivia: Su estructura y sus derechos en el
Pacífico (La Paz: Banco Central-Academia Boliviana de la Historia, 1979);
José Fellman Velarde, Réquiem para una rebeldía (La Paz: Los Amigos del
Libro, 1967); Edgar Oblitas, Historia secreta de la Guerra del Pacífico (Buenos
Aires: Peña Lillo, 1978).
12 An Andean Spanish term for a landowner and local political boss. The
word is derived from the name of a weed; it therefore has a connotation of
illegitimacy that distinguishes the concept from that of feudalism.
13 Carlos M ontenegro, Nacionalismo y coloniaje (Buenos Aires: Pleamar,
1967), p. 190: ‘The predominance of the colonial spirit in that stage of the life
o f Bolivia is revealed in these unmistakable signs: the abandonm ent of the
national territory to the invaders, and a zealous constitutionalism.’
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 23

of disconnection from the Río de la Plata or the dispossession of the

banks in the Amazon,14 is the loss of Atacama, or at least of the main
part of the Atacaman territory that was Antofagasta, which entailed a
rupture of the spatial logic through which that historical unit had been
constituted. Andean agriculture, which is surely the most important
civilizational event that has occurred here and in all of Latin America,
and then Potosí, or Charcas,15are organized around and derive their
identity from this territorial matrix. Santa Cruz is called de la Sierra
because it refers not to the Rio de la Plata or to the Amazon, but, pre­
cisely, to the Sierra.16It could not be something alien to it and perhaps,
in certain circumstances, it could be at the heart of the Sierra. Atacama
was an archetypically appropriated territory, incorporated into the
ecological logic of the Andeans, and it is therefore not just any coast
suitable for modern commerce that could have occasioned such a col­
lective feeling of disintegration. The struggle for existence in the great
Andes entails such extreme precariousness that such existence is not
possible without the support of those surrounding regions, which do
not define it but which give it a certain existential security.17
Certainly, these are far from insignificant incentives. Why, then,
did this society, which had always fought so hard, fight so little then?
We are inclined to consider how an event is lived to be some­
thing of ever-greater importance; this, in the social sphere, is perhaps
more decisive than its exteriorization (or at least a substantial
element of its objectivity). In any case, it would be impossible to
experience such an event, which either has not been totalized or has

14 J. Valerie Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location and Politics since 1825 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972).
15 Josep M. Barnadas, Charcas: Orígenes históricos de una sociedad colonial
( 1535-1565) (La Paz: CIPCA, 1973).
16 Hernando Sanabria Fernández, Breve historia de Santa Cruz (La Paz: Juven­
tud, 1973).
17 John V. Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (Lima:
IEP, 1975); Ramiro Condarco Morales, El escenario andino y el hombre: Ecología
y antropogeografía de los Andes Centrales (La Paz: Librería Renovación, 1971).
24 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

lost the forms of its totalization, as a coherent totality. The very idea
of totalization or general intersubjectification18 refers to something
that is never acquired once and for all, and thus the nation can exist
more within a collective project or prognosis than within an exhaus­
tive homogeneity; moreover, even what has been generalized sooner
or later tends towards its transformation into a conservative symbol
of the particular. Intersubjectification must, therefore, be constantly
reproduced. Men such as Prudencio Bustillo who were the vanguard
or spirit of the consciousness of the state (not of social consciousness,
because that would be an overstatement; we say this because in prac­
tice the Bolivian state itself would have been Bustillo)19 had warned
of this ineluctable situation. It was not, after all, so complicated, and
ultimately, Bustillo is but the common sense of a truly parochial lack
of common sense. Portales himself would have had no more than a
rhetorical existence had he not produced the War of the Pacific. An
insensitivity to the seriousness of the conflict is evident in Daza
(although it is also evident in the rest of the men of state, including
Baptista and, of course, Arce, who resolved to join in his enemies’
victory, founding a whole school).20 What is worth noting in all this,

18 See p. 47.
19 Ignacio Prudencio Bustillo, La misión Bustillo: Más antecedentes de la
Guerra del Pacífico (Sucre: Imprenta Bolívar, 1919). At any rate, it is an isolated
case. It can easily be said that there would be no bourgeois national conscious­
ness of such depth until Montenegro. At some point Bustillo’s polemic against
Alberdi published under a pseudonym should discussed.
20 Aniceto Arce was an associate of Melchor Concha y Toro, of whom
Ramirez Necochea says: ‘A n influential liberal politician. Member of Parlia­
m ent for more or less 30 years. [ . . . ] He opposed the Balmaceda government
and, when civil war broke out, he declared himself on the side of Congress.
He m ade a name for himself as a businessman; he had powerful banking and
m ining interests; he extended his activities to Bolivia and was closely associ­
ated with British capital’ (Hernán Ramirez Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrar­
revolución de 1891 [Santiago: Ed. Universitaria, 1969], p. 84. Arce said: ‘The
only hope for Bolivia’s salvation is Chile’s need to enlist it to ensure its own
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 25

however, is that the ideologeme of space is very different in society

understood as the masses (which can also be conceived in terms of
confrontation) and in the oligarchic stratum which is there and
then the whole state (although the state is not the whole oligarchic
stratum).
The problem should be posed, in our view, in the following man­
ner: the originary event of this society makes space predominate over
time. Adaptation to the harsh environment marks its elemental his­
torical time.
Those rnitmaq were just a belated and distorted manifesta­
tion of an ancient Andean pattern that I have called ‘the ver­
tical control of a maximum of ecological tiers.*21
The unity of space, therefore, is but an extension of this historical
time, which is not that of capitalism (which does indeed break with
agricultural time), but a local form of seasonal agricultural time.22
Here political unity is derived from the necessities of subsistence and
subsistence itself can only be conceived as collective time. The first
consequence of this is that intersubjectivity is a precocious and vio­
lent event.23

conquests’ (Santiago Vaca Guzmán, El doctor Arce y su rol en la política

boliviana; examen de sus opiniones concernientes a la celebración de la paz entre
Bolivia y Chile [Buenos Aires: Coni, 1881], p. 37).
21 Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas, p. 60.
22 ‘In the formation of the Andean state and in the structure of the revenue
system, one of the first and most im portant steps was the census of towns,
chacras or papakancha, livestock and herders, and annual production levels’
(ibid., p. 31).
23 ‘Most of the potatoes harvested are true alpine crops, frost-resistant but
also highly dependent on hum an intervention (John V. M urra, La organi­
zación económica del Estado inca [Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978], p. 33; avail­
able in English as: The Economic Organization o f the Inca State [New Haven,
CT: JAI Press, 1980]).
26 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Early in the history of the Altiplano a political authority

emerged that continuously demanded a growing fraction of
the productive energy if its inhabitants, herds and lands.24
From this we derive the unity of space conceived as territorial
reciprocity or politico-geographic pact (the geographic, understood
as geology occupied by history, is not possible without the state) in
the traditional Andean sense: one space cannot be conceived except
in relation to another.25 And this is what has been called the
archipelago’ or ‘vertical control of a maximum of ecological tiers’.
Agriculture in the highlands is not sufficient in itself without the
complement of the agriculture of the lowlands, although certainly
the latter would not have the capacity to fulfil this role if not for telos
or solidity of the state proper to highland agriculture. The proof of
this is that the subsistence agriculture of the fertile lowlands in this
period generated only primitive state forms.26
The precondition of the state, therefore, is not surplus value but
the conscious mode of its acquisition. At the same time, if we turn
now to consider the problem at the level of the internalization of the
event at the time of the War of the Pacific, we must say that this was
then a buried and innate attribute, proper and at the same time
unknown to the ancestral actor of the event, which is the Andean
collectivity. Since the decisive thing here is the ideologico-cultural
impotence of the gamonal-Hispanic elite, it was inevitable that their
conceptions of life and of the land would be inimical.
The traditional Andean idea of space will always be different
from the oligarchie-seigneurial, regional and non-national idea. The

24 M urra, Formaciones económicas y políticas, pp. 213-14.

25 O n the enorm ous productivity in such harsh geographic conditions,
Choy suggested that the proximity of such diverse climatic zones could be an
explanation (M urra, La organización económica, p. 15).
26 Such capacity for quantification has not been seen since. ‘An efficient cen­
sus system is, among other things, an indication of the strength of the state
(ibid., p. 168).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 27

originary idea of space, because that space was the matrix of the pri­
mordial organization of life, is opposed to a patrimonial conception.
It is well known, however, that space plays a determinative role in
the relation to the state, that is, we have here two competing concep­
tions that are both spatialist. On the seigneurial side, which is that
of the state, we have the hereditary notion of power in its double
sense: on the one hand, as the idea of private power (the rosea)27 and,
on the other, as an extension of the seigneurial or feudal relation to
the land, an absolute dominion over the land as an entitlement tied
to a lineage, as a general principle of power. That regional or partic-
ularist conflict is so intense within the Hispanic contingent and, on
the other hand, that the coexistence of Aymaras and Quechuas is so
natural, although in theory the whites are said to ultimately belong
more or less to a single ethnic group while, strictly speaking, a
Quechua should be as foreign to an Aymara as a Spaniard, bears wit­
ness to the existence of these two conceptions or principles.28 It is

27 This local epithet speaks to the Bolivian ruling class’ sense of being an abso­
lute minority. It is said to have been first used by Bautista Saavedra.
28 All this is quite complicated. It is not clear that Aymara was the language
of La Paz, for example, and there is some evidence that it might have been
Puquina (Alfredo Torero, El quechua y la historia social andina [Lima:
Studium, 1975], p. 57). Moreover, ‘nobody has found valid reason to maintain
that Quechua existed in Bolivia prior to the arrival of the Incas,’ although there
is no doubt that Quechua ultimately became the lingua franca of the colony
(Gary Parker, ‘Falacias y verdades acerca del quechua’ in Alberto Escobar
(ed.), El reto del multilingUismo en el Perú [Lima: IEP, 1973], p. 117). In other
words, the borders between Quechua and Aymara were never absolute. This
means that there is an identity, even if it is produced between two languages,
which is like a paradigm of intersubjectivity. Meanwhile, the Hispanic sector,
which is assumed to be of greater homogeneous and monolingual provenance,
is very far from such an identification. The fragmentation of reality proper to
the gamonal mentality has cost the Hispanic group dearly. Indeed, it remains
to be seen whether the chief obstacle to nationalization in Bolivia is not in
fact the degree of cultural and symbolic dispersion of its ruling class and not,
as has been said almost by reflex, the presence of the indigenous.
28 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

not that the oligarchs like Arce or Pacheco had no sense of belonging
to the space, but that the feelings they had were connected to a
seigneurial notion of space. This is the deep origin of what is called
regionalism in Bolivia, that is, the incapacity for an experience of
space as a national reality or even as something not directly linked
to a personal relation to the land, as something conceived trans-
personally or collectively.29
A country, or a society (or human nucleus), wages war with what
it is, but also with what it is not. If a war is a radical event, if it is uni­
versal, it creates social receptivity. If it is not, it can shatter the society
that it was supposed to defend. The true optimum for this purpose
is produced when, as is said to have occurred with the ancient
Scandinavians, the society goes to war en masse, that is, when no
particle of the social body is unaffected by the war. For this to occur,
first of all, the social corpus as such must feel itself to be unified to a
certain extent (the principle of connection) and, on the other hand,
and this is related to the first point, it must regard the object of the
war as something central, vital and unrenounceable, something that
must not be lost except when all is lost. Where the nation does not
exist, men cannot be asked to take part in a national war or to possess
a national sensibility in relation to the territory. That of the Bolivian
ruling class is a particularist idea of the nation. These men experi­
enced the dispossession of the coast as something inessential, as if,
conserving the main part of the country, it was merely an incidental
loss (this is why they accepted money for a territory that should
never have been for sale), because such was their mentality: this
land had no seigneurial connection whatsoever nor did it have a
seigneurial use; to lose it, then, was like losing nothing at all, a mere
inconvenience.30

29 ‘The oligarchic notion of territorial integrity was merely a notion of

property’ (Montenegro, Nacionalismo y coloniaje, p. 207).
30 Aniceto Arce attributed the war to our madness’ (Arguedas, Historia gen­
eral de Bolivia, p. 1341).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 29

We must of course explain why the other Bolivia, that which

should indeed have seen these things as the gravest injury, took so
long to assess the situation. The perplexity with which the social
body experienced so considerable a loss can be explained by the fact
that the prior spatial logic, which was in reality a combination of
traditional Andean agriculture and the despotic state as its natural
culmination (because without an authoritarian organization agricul­
ture was impossible),31 had withdrawn to what we will call the crys­
tallized or ossified aspect of the country’s history (for it also has
dynamic aspects). Modes of production would come and go without
interrupting the repetition of the productive patterns of Andean agri­
culture, and would merely be translated into juridical forms of cir­
culation superimposed upon local practices of the transformation of
nature.32 The old state had retracted into the moment of production
itself and, therefore, the apex of the state in relation to this would
never be more than a weakly supported facade. Strictly speaking, the
local mode of production would not change over the course of sev­
eral juridical forms, from Asiatic despotism to commercial capital,
from gamonalism to simple mercantile production, which only con­
cealed or masked it. A country is always what its agriculture is. Agri­
culture even today remains the characteristic mode of relation
between man and nature, and even when it is said that industry pre­
dominates over agriculture, industry in fact functions in the service
of this essential human activity. In a comparison of the kinds of agri­
culture practised in Bolivia, its true nature comes to light. Nomadic
agriculture that necessarily creates certain errant and sporadic
representations is one thing, and the pillage of the land, the only kind

31 See note 23.

32 This should be qualified. Toledo, for example, effectively transformed the
com m unity in all the Andes. Still, it is true that the productive act in itself
(what we might call the logic of the highlands and the microclimates plus the
collective pattern of productive organization) survives, permeating its super-
structural expression. The latifundium, for example, is but a superficial form
of plunder of the surplus; never has something so brutal been so impotent.
30 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

of capitalist agriculture that has been practised here, is another; yet

another, lastly, is the form of exploitation in which ecological con­
servation is one of the central objectives.33 In the plot of Raza de
bronce34 or in the geographic logic of Santa Cruz, in the Economic
Plan of the National Revolution35or in Mendoza’s Macizo boliviano,36
we find only more or less sketchy reminiscences of the principle of
ecological tiers. At the level of its superstructural expression, this
might be a repressed or buried concept, but it cannot be eradicated
from the collective mind. It is, therefore, an inherent thinking. The
breaking off of Atacama was a violation of this integral body.37
The dispersion or nonexistence of a collective sense of space, on
the other hand, leads to a kind of fragmented hypersensitivity
towards certain spaces. It appears that the question of the Pacific
seemed more significant for La Paz and Oruro in the beginning and
only later for Tarija or Potosí.38 In any case, if the ruling class is the
official synthesis of the country (as every ruling class is), its disar­
ticulation is clearly evident in the immediate defection of almost all
of this class, in all of its expressions. This wretched country found
itself forced to defend a city that had been christened Antofagasta

33 ‘From Cobo we learn that the use of fertilizers was one of the things the
Europeans learnt in Peru’ (Murra, La organización económica, p. 61). We
m ight also m ention the effects of irrigation on the coast, etc., for the state.
34 Alcides Arguedas, Raza de bronce (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1972).
35 Guevara Arze, Plan inmediato.
36 Mendoza, El macizo boliviano.
37 ‘The Pacaxas [ . . . ] had possessions on the Pacific coast, apparently inter­
spersed with those of the Lupaga’ (Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas,
p. 753). ‘The Aymara-speaking kingdoms extended their control not only
towards the Pacific, but also to the edge of the rainforest and beyond’ (ibid.,
p. 77).
38 The ‘Colorados’ join the fight in El Alto de la Alianza with the rallying cry
‘Long live the youth o f La Paz!’ See Alcides Arguedas, Historia general de
Bolivia, p. 1338.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 31

after an estate owned by Melgarejos brother,39 and its select troop

was the regiment created and favoured by that drunken brute.40
Barbarous caudillos like Melgarejo, because he foresaw cause of the
dispossession,41 or like Daza, because he was oblivious to the mag­
nitude of the event, but also the lineage of the lettered caudillos,
those of relative constitutional legitimacy (Arce, Baptista) and their
great successors (Montes, Pando), men revered to this day—in all
of them was the sole emphatic decision not to fight for that which
was deemed pure periphery. It would surely have seemed to them
more terrible to lose the Virgin of Copacabana. The same men who,
like Daza, proved overzealous when it came to military privileges
regarded it as no dishonour at all for the army not to have fought or
even to to have considered fighting at any point in time.
Closed off in the agricultural sphere and practising a moral
economy of resistance,42 conservation and persistence, the vast pop­
ular corpus, although it only belatedly came to an awareness of the
problem, would do so with an intensity that can only be explained
by the in te rp e lla te force of space over ideological interference in
this society.
*

39 ‘Melgarejo changed the name of La Chimba to Antofagasta, which was the

name of an estate that a brother of his owned in the puna of Atacama (Roberto
Querejazu Calvo, Guano, salitre, sangre: historia de la Guerra del Pacífico [La
Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1979], p. 136).
40 Arguedas, Historia general de Bolivia, p. 934.
41 Querajazu, Guano, salitre, sangre. Melarejo was of such a character, such
was the paucity of his sense of sovereignty, that he asked Chile ‘to send a gar­
rison of fifty Chilean soldiers with their respective officers to reside in Cobija
in view of his confidence in the discipline, morality, and determination of the
Chilean troops’ (Gonzalo Bulnes, Resumen de la Guerra del Pacífico [Santiago:
Ediciones del Pacífico, 1976], p. 16).
42 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eigh­
teenth C entury’, Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136.
32 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

We might say that at the heart of the War of the Pacific was a conflict
over the surplus because, as we shall see, Chile wanted to be Peru,43
which, with Potosí, had been a symbol of the wealth of the world,
surplus as magic; Bolivia thought that it was not Peru because Chile
had snatched the philosopher’s stone from it and Peru wanted only
to go back to being itself, at least that of the guano surplus, but to do
it better this time. Everyone here was seduced by the idea of a
panacea. Meanwhile the Federal Revolution, which is the next
moment of this history, would pose the question of the axis of the
state, understood as a pivot of the spatial articulation of the country
(one of the aspects of the optimum), which already brings us to the
core of the national question as one of the central problems of the
Bolivia of that time, that is, as a relation of the territory to the terri­
tory and of men with men, space understood as a relation to space
but also as a struggle among men and between men and the spaces
they inhabit.
We must return to the question of Bolivia’s non-combativeness.
It is true that the first thing that strikes us in the War of the Pacific
is the lack of a collective will (this is not an exaggeration) to fight for
a portion of the territory that was vital to the core of the country,
that is, the refusal (because the people were unarmed and as a con­
sequence of the field of vision of the elite) to see it as something abso­
lutely crucial. Here we must distinguish between territory that has
been socially incorporated or appropriated and that which has not,

43 Peru and Bolivia together, according to Portales, ‘would always be more

than Chile. In this remarkable letter, he says that ‘we cannot view the existence
of the two confederated peoples without great consternation and alarm and,
in the long run, as a result of their common origin, language, habits, religion,
ideas and customs, they will naturally form a single nucleus’. The explanation
for this was their greater white population, ‘the combined wealth of Peru and
Bolivia barely exploited until now’ ‘the greater number of learned white men
well connected to the Spanish families in Lima (Diego Portales, quoted in
Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 1822-1933 [Lima: Editorial
Universitaria, 1968-1970], vol. 2, p. 149).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 33

because this indicates the extent to which it has penetrated the ulti­
mate ethos of a nation. There are inherent or essential territories,
that is, those without which a people cannot be what it is, and
marginal or supplemental territories, which are those that accom­
pany or complement the vital core. Since Atacama was a limit or
frontier made fit for human life by the Andeans and no one else,44
and considering, moreover, that neither Spaniards nor Araucanians
had ever settled there, the Andeans considered it in their collective
soul to be part of their central home, which, incidentally, goes against
Tamayos exceedingly narrow latifundista ideas on the subject.45 In
other words, it belonged to the intellectual horizon of the Aymara,
to their spatial discourse. In a radical rupture with this general con­
ception of the space, the seigneurial class experienced its disposses­
sion with a kind of ease or indifference scarcely moderated by the
flagrant humiliation with which the rather inexperienced Chilean
emissaries, newly risen to glory, were inclined to treat them.46
In any case, had there not been a general failure to understand
that the territory in question was one socially incorporated into the
innate logic of the nation, the nation would not have been able to
lose it without first facing the loss of the whole of the nation itself. A
man or a nation of sound mind does not lose something vital without
losing or at least risking his very life. Here, however, the territory was
lost because those who knew that they were losing it thought of it as
dispensable.
Just as today it is perpetually said on the subject of imperialism
that since we cannot beat it we must live under it, it was said then
that Chiles material superiority was so insuperable that retreating to

44 See note 37.

45 See Mariano Baptista Gumucio, Yo fu i cl orgullo. Vida y pensamien:¿ ¿c
Franz Tamayo (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1978).
46 Abraham Kbning, Chilean minister in Bolivia, wrote in 1900: ‘O ar
are born of victory, the supreme law of nations’ (Jorge Escoban Q jskan$¿i.
Historia diplomática dc Bolivia; Política internacional [La Paz: Casa M -zrizpii
de la Cultura Franz Tamayo, 1975), p. 79).
34 * REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

the mountains was the only reasonable option. This was false, of
course, even from a military standpoint. Even under radically infe­
rior conditions, the dispossessed nation fights with a certain para­
doxical advantage because it moves within itself, on the condition
that what is at stake belongs to it, something that, as we have seen,
was only true for a buried part of the nation.47 The very fact that the
invader moved with greater ease in that environment shows that, in
terms of immediate, effective belonging, Bolivia, because it was Arce’s
Bolivia and not Willkas,48 was even farther from that Bolivian terri­
tory than was the Chilean state.49 That was the real conquest. The
war was just its inevitable consummation.
Arce himself was determined that the vanquished partner was
the victor,50 and indeed his role in this history is that of the advocate
of a repetition, with the silver of Colquechaca,51 of Chiles felicitous
coastal nitrate venture. It is surprising, to say the least, that this man
is even today considered a paragon of Bolivian patriotism. No less
can be said of Baptista, who proposed an alliance between Bolivia
and Argentina, or of Montes, who sought unification with Chile (no
longer just as a partner but to form a single country, in which Bolivia

47 If we adhere to Francisco Antonio Encinas account, in Antofagasta, out of

a total population of 8,507 residents, there were 6,554 Chileans in 1878. This
speaks to the fact that, whatever the importance of the Andean sphere in its
constitutive moment, the capitalist formation of the Chilean nation had
claimed the same locus.
48 ‘Willka* was the patronymic adopted by various kolla leaders over the
course o f their struggles in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century
(C ondarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka).
49 There were 40 Bolivian gendarmes in the territory that would supply the
greatest economic surplus of the subsequent period in the Americas.
50 See note 20.
51 It is significant that Chilean capital had such great expansive capacity when
it came to the raw materials of the coast and not, or at least not to the same
extent, w ith those of the Altiplano. Thus, Patinos expulsion of Artigue from
La Salvadora contributed to his future prestige.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 35

surely would not fare especially well).52These distinguished figures,53

all of them adhering to the sacred doctrine of regional patriotism,
betray the poverty of geographic consciousness of the nation that
pervaded this class. As we shall see, the state revenue of the liberal
era did not come from tin and the other minerals, which could have
supplied it in abundance, but from payments from Chile and Brazil
in exchange for territory, namely, Cobija and Acre.54 It is impossible
to express the incalculable damage done to the soul of a country, that
is, to the ideology with which it sees itself, when it loses land without
defending it, receives money for it (it makes no difference how
much), wishes to disappear in the face of the enemy. The ailing caste
saw the land as it saw everything else and as it would see the world
thereafter, as something of little importance, so long as it did not
serve the logic of its lineage in an almost familial way.
The territory is the foundation of a people; only blood itself is
as important.55 Still, there are nations or peoples that have pre-existed
their space and territorial unity can increase or decrease, or even dis­
appear to a certain extent and for a certain period of time, because
the desideratum of their constitution as a people or nation is not in
that element. Here, however, it is the space that creates the people, as
the element in which the nation must come to be. The territory, then,

52 Montes at one point in fact came to propose the fusion of Bolivia and Chile
into a single country, a notion decried by Franz Tamayo.
53 In the local lore, indeed, the names Arce, Baptista and Montes are never
absent from the pantheon of national heroes, which can only be explained as
a whitewashing of the facts within the history of a single continuous caste that
persists to this day.
54 In exchange for its coast, Bolivia took 2,500,000 pounds sterling. Brazil
paid no more than 1,000,000 for all of Acre.
55 ‘The territory [ . . . ] is the first and most sacred of national possessions,
because it contains within it all of the others’ (Rafael Bustillo, in a letter to
President Morales dated 12 March 1872 [Querejazu Calvo, Guano, salitre,
sangre, p. 91]).
36 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

conceived in terms of its quality or substantiality, is of crucial impor­

tance here.
Of course the territory of a country as the term is generally
understood is merely a cartographic fact. When it is said that Brazil
has an area of 8 million square kilometres, what this really means is
that this is Brazils territorial project or objective. In the 5 million
empty square kilometres of the Amazon, meanwhile, Brazil does not
yet exist nor does anything; it is an unassimilated territory. We can,
therefore, distinguish between the cartographic area and the states
legitimacy in a territory because for the latter what counts is that the
authority of the state can be enforced, albeit by means of pure, imme­
diate military force, that is, even if the state does not occupy the ter­
ritory but impedes its occupation by anyone else. This constitutes a
primitive form of territorial legitimacy because it is founded only on
a threat, a practical circumstance: neither you nor I have any right
to anything here, but I can punish anyone who challenges my claim.
This kind of legitimation, however, has little to do with the notion
of socially incorporated space.56 Here it is not just a matter of the invo­
cation of a juridical apparatus or objective, or even of the military
capability of imposing its claim. It is a matter of the real efficacy or
internalization of the essentially external phenomenon that is a ter­
ritory. It is a performance transformed into a constant flow of deter­
mination that affirms: I am myself and my space; this space will not
be recognizable without me; I am not myself outside this space. There
is a particular kind of relation between a certain space and a certain
man, and even a certain form of relationality between them, that is,
a particular, palpable cultural event has occurred.
In other cases, the pathetic encounter with the external is a prob­
lem of state power; this occurs with peoples whose origin is the state,
which also becomes their end. On the other hand, articulation or

56 The interpellation or hailing to identification or interpenetration can come

from war or from any profound event. Here, undoubtedly, the nucleus of the
call to intersubjectivity was determ ined by the space.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 37

unification can be produced outside of the territory or conceiving the

territory as something external to it, and also outside of the state, that
is, both territory and state can be its product and not its origin. Here,
on the contrary, we have a particular mode of relation between space
or collective matter, identity and power. Geography, as sign, as chal­
lenge, as calling, has determined everything.57
Let us turn then to the problem of the scene of nationalization.
Modern men exist at once as individuals and as certain forms of total­
ization or collectivization. Ours is an era of the predominance of the
ideological. We can discuss it in genetic, instrumental or determina­
tive terms, but the fact is that the mode of participation in the world
today is determined by the primacy of intersubjectivity. It is not just
a matter of interaction among men, but a particular type of intersub­
jectivity that is proper to juridically free men. Juridically means having
the choice; one is not free simply because one is juridically free, but
one has the right or claim to freedom. Wise men know the importance
of a consecrated or inalienable right as a call to praxis. It has the same
function as myth or immutable belief, mutatis mutandis. The territory
is the locus where intersubjectivity has been produced; it is the non-
spatial determination of space and it is here that the material world
begins to have a history. It is upon this path that we would have to
embark were we engaged in a purely academic discourse on the rather
serious problem of precapitalist nations. The territory contains the
potentiality of nature. The transformation of nature is consciously wit­
nessed only in processes whose organizational principle is one of ter­
ritorial annexation (so-called Asiatic despotism) and in the capitalist

57 This is persistently intuited in Bolivian thought, although of course without

much rigour. ‘The greatness of a race is directly proportional to the difficulties
overcome in its struggle with the environment’ (Tamayo, Creación de la ped­
agogía nacional, chap. 9), and also: ‘The kolla have conquered the land through
perm anent submission to it.’ W hat is undeniable is that behind the collective
form is a particular logic of the natural world conceived as habitat [escenario]
(cited in Guillermo Francovich, La filosofía en Bolivia [La Paz: Juventud,
1966], p. 91).
38 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

mode of production, for very different reasons.58 The role of the wit­
ness is decisive here, although in the first case it is collective, and in
the second case it is so only in a differed way. In examining the con­
struction of a discourse, would it be of little account to ask where the
discourse occurs? Hegemony, if it is produced, is produced somewhere.
It is, therefore, linked to a symbol-space, to a kind of geological totem.
The god of Andean culture is the space determined by the Andean
mountain chain, which, of course, cannot have the same function as
the Pyrenees or the Apennines for the Spaniards or the Italians.59 In
any case, to derive ideological and state forms from a space, like the
Andeans, is not the same thing as to conquer a territory not bound to
the peoples own identity, something which, in order to succeed, must
be the consequence of a previously existing identity.60 In this case, the
people constructs its space; in the other, the space forms the people.61
But what was really at issue here between Peru, Bolivia and
Chile? The thesis that on one side was perfect treachery and on
the other total innocence is ultimately untenable. It is a fact, for
example, that just as Portales formulated a policy against Santa Cruz,
the latter assumed the categorical superiority of Peru and Bolivia.
We should say, rather, that it was a confrontation between a vain self-
satisfaction, that of Peru to a greater extent but also that of Bolivia,
since they were ingenuous countries,62 and a certain sense of adven­
ture, a certain inferiority complex and a precociousness of the

58 In Asiatic despotism, because the state tends to be originally determined

by a spatial foundation. In capitalism, because to a great extent there is a con­
quest of space by time, that is, the qualitative abolition of space is the necessary
condition of the concentration of time.
59 The function of a border; the Andeans live in the Andes.
60 The most characteristic case is the construction of its space by the nation
in the United States—the nation preceded its environment.
61 Although surely no one can uproot and resettle himself without simulta­
neously transform ing himself.
62 C ountries in which what Vico called the ‘vanity of nations’ replaces the
production o f the most elemental certainties.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 39

state on the part of Chile. In effect, the antagonism was between

conflicting constitutive moments or irreconcilable vital principles.
Yet in the form in which this antagonism appears or is phenomenal-
ized, it revolved around the question of the surplus or an irrationalist
view of economic development,63 a view that, irrationalist or not, was
deeply rooted in the tangible experience of these peoples. We must,
therefore, discuss the relation between economic surplus and state
receptivity. From the outset, each nation saw the greatness of the
others or what appeared to be their greatness as something inimical
to it. This certainly has to do with the forms of originary accumula­
tion proper to each. The colossal and boastful a spectacle of the
guano boom in Peru, which added wealth to the excess of titles and
the anticipation of so neat a surplus as that of the nitrate Fields, how­
ever, turned that latent tension into something urgent. What gives a
certain politico-economic content to Chiles project is, moreover, the
marked decline of its prospects in the global wheat market.64
We have here, then, the geopolitical consequences of what is per­
haps the most fundamental and intrinsic myth of Latin America.
The surplus is, of course, a global symbol and not just one of capi­
talism. The philosophers stone or manna constitute such fantasies

63 See note 67.

64 ‘Chile had its first economic crisis between 1858 and 1861 as a result of the
closure of the Californian and Australian markets. Having overcome this hur­
dle, it experienced another period of distress beginning in 1873 and ending
in 1877 or 1878. This intense crisis was brought upon the country by a
decrease in the price of agricultural products (Julio César Jobet, Ensayo crítico
del desarrollo económico-social de Chile [Mexico City: Centro de Estudios del
Movimiento Obrero Salvador Allende, 1982], p. 54). It does not follow that
the grave situation, the ‘intense crisis’, was the efficient cause of the war. What
matters here is that within a national project, sustained over the course of suc­
cessive governments, a critical m ethod could be transform ed into an eco­
nomic and military policy. A. Edwards, however, maintains that ‘if not for the
War of the Pacific, the Pinto government might well have ended in a revolu­
tion (in ibid., p. 64).
40 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

of abundance. In any case, a culture of second sons65 combined with

the avarice inherent to mercantilism to produce the ideologeme of
El Dorado or Gran Paititi,66 which is like the ultimate spirit of the
Conquest. ‘Gold,’ Columbus would say, ‘is a marvel.’ Without the sur­
plus supplied by America, there could have been no world market
and indeed no political reorganization of the globe such as followed
the price revolution. From this we can draw two conclusions: on the
one hand, that the surplus, in effect, could generate a state of recep­
tivity, of plasticity and of inclination towards the new; on the other,
it could be a source of aggression and disorder. Of course, the surplus
in itself means nothing except in relation to the previous society to
which it refers and therefore it is said that the gold of America
impoverished Spain. It is nonetheless true that the toolkit of the mod­
ern state has something to do with the notion of surplus. If by medi­
ation we understand the transformation of the fury of the oppressed
into part of the programme of the oppressor, which is after all a hege­
monic relation, it is obvious that mediation is all the more possible
the greater the surplus because to represent the state to society and
society to the state is something that involves money, concessions or
privileges. Still, the concept of surplus is, in the first place, a relative
concept because it must refer to a surplus relative to a given moral-
historical norm,67 and, secondly, the relation of surplus itself to the

65 Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti, Losfundamentos del mundo m od­

erno: Edad Media tardía, Renacimiento, Reforma (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,
1979), p. 185.
66 H ernando Sanabria Fernández, En busca de El Dorado: La colonización del
oriente boliviano por los crúcenos (La Paz: Juventud, 1973); Svetlana
Alekseevna Sozina, En el horizonte está El Dorado (La Habana: Casa de las
Américas, 1982).
67 The basic idea here is of course Marx’s. The necessary labour of each epoch
gives it a m oral level. The moral dimension of compensation, consumption,
the horizon of life, is defined by the level of purchasing power. The surplus,
therefore, should also be measured in relation to this; however, it is possible,
strictly speaking, to generate a surplus by means of a stripping of that moral-
historical measure.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 41

question of receptivity is one of species to genus.68 In the established

dogma of surplus as the only possible form of receptivity lies the
legacy of the mercantilist core of the Spanish foundation of America,
as perpetual tributary to commercial capital. If receptivity is the
originary moment of the state, insofar as it signifies an openness or
general malleability before a proposition, this leads to a double con­
sequence: conservative in one sense, because the idea that wealth cre­
ates power is a vertical, reactionary and elitist notion, while the
receptivity generated by popular action, as a mass will to transfor­
mation, is a revolutionary event. We have, then, two conceptions of
the problem: the democratic form of production of receptivity and
the vertical form. While it is true that surplus generates receptivity,
this, in the sense of men prepared for a substitution of loyalties,
beliefs and principles, occurs even more powerfully when it entails
a concrete rupture with their routine. The conflict between the force
of habit and the replacement of loyalties underlies all this. In this
sense, America is a conservative continent because it believes more
readily in transformation through surplus than through intellectual
reform. This is indisputably at the core of our inheritance. It might
seem absurd to speak of conservative ossifications in a continent with
a young population and that is itself practically a symbol of youth—
it has been called 'the triumph of health’69—but this is indeed the
case. It is not necessary to be successful in order to be conservative.
Even the indigent of America are undoubtedly quite conservative.70
Receptivity reveals a moment of internal groundlessness, of non­
conditionality. This is a serious matter if we consider that the general
foundation of modern societies is determined by the way in which

68 In the sense that a surplus enables the development of receptivity or mal­

leability, but not all receptivity is born of a surplus.
69 Romano and Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno.
70 Occidentalism, for example, is in practice a popular school of thought in
Latin America; its insertion in this context cannot but have a profoundly reac­
tionary sense.
42 # RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

they achieve their totalization. That is, totalization plus the qualita­
tive form in which totalization is realized.
[T]he same division of labour that turns them into indepen­
dent private producers also makes the social process of pro­
duction and the relations of the individual producers to each
other within that process independent of the producers
themselves; they also find out that the independence of the
individuals from each other has as its counterpart and sup­
plement a system of all-round material dependence.71
We have, in the first place, generalized circulation, that is, every­
one produces for another and no one for himself. This in itself speaks
to a specific form of totalization, no doubt superior to previous
orms. The crux of the issue resides, however, not in the simple fact
of generalization but in the interaction that comes with it, which is
an interaction among free men, that is, if circulatory totalization itself
contains a moment of receptivity or emptiness, because man has
been untethered from the conditions of his previous discourse, he
immediately gives himself over to the formation of a new ideology,
the ideological substitute, which is a particularly powerful intersub­
jectivity for it is grounded in the will of juridically free men. This
interpenetration clearly must be greater than that produced among
men who do not construct such an interaction but are passively
homogenized because they have a common master.72 If the existence
of juridically free man is a sine qua non of capitalism and such are
the collective-ideological consequences of originary accumulation,
this nonetheless should not be oversimplified. Ultimately, we can

71 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol . 1 (Ben Fowkes

trans.) (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 202-03. Here we see the development
of a new entity (the social process) which is the result of the specific form of
independence in capitalism that is founded upon a mutual or general-market
dependence.
72 In a way, here m en make one another in their own image, but no one
emerges unscathed from such an interpenetration.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 43

speak of the farmer and junker modes of intersubjectivity and surely

even if the entire ritual of what is called the capitalist mode of pro­
duction is fulfilled, we would still have to discuss the historical con­
ditions in which it occurred, that is, its specific content.73
Our claim, then, is that the three countries involved in the con­
flict obstinately shared the same myth of the surplus.74 We have also
claimed that not all surplus generates receptivity, although it is
indeed a favourable element in its production. What interests us,
then, is receptivity and not the surplus; receptivity, moreover, only
as it relates to the question of the constitutive moment.
This is a concept that will have to be used repeatedly over the
course of this exposition. [Alexis de] Tocqueville defined it almost
ingenuously: ‘Every people bears the mark of its origin. ‘The circum­
stances that surround its birth and aid its development also influence
the subsequent course of its existence.*75 The concept is more com­
plex than this, but this definition will do for now. If it is true that
men cannot experience anything without making it into a represen­
tation, or experience a representation without translating it into a
discourse, this means that the conception of the world’ is an instinct.
Ideology is essential and it is durable. No one is willing to sacrifice
his conception of the world except when he is compelled to do so by

73 The social process can be constructed either as the self-constitution of civil

society or through the subsumption of the state in society (junker). In any
case, if intersubjectivity exists in the abstract, we must still determine which
route has been taken to arrive at it because here what is important is the cat­
egory plus the determ ination of its origin or accumulation.
74 Paul Alexander Baran takes up Bettelheims definition, which says that ‘the
economic surplus [ . . . ] is constituted by a portion of the net social product
appropriated by the non-working classes’ (Excedente económico e irracional­
idad capitalista [Mexico City: Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente, 1980], p. 75).
Here we use the concept in the sense of the difference between the product of
labour and the non-confiscated portion of the goods produced.
75 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Arthur Goldhammer trans.)
(New York: Library of America, 2004[ 1835]). p. 31.
44 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

a momentous and imposing force. Of course, there may be peoples

with more diffuse constitutive moments than others, more syncretic
and weaker. Still, there are certain profound events, certain unfailing
processes, even certain instances of collective psychology that found
the mode of being of a society for a long period of time. An inter-
pellative event at a moment of general receptivity, at a constitutive
moment, is destined to survive as a kind of unconscious or substrate
of that society.76This is the tragic role of the past in history; in a way,
one can only ever do what has already been foreseen. Great epi­
demics and famines, wars and, in our time, revolutions, are the clas­
sic moments of general receptivity: men are prepared to substitute
the universe of their beliefs. This role was fulfilled by the constitution
of space—by agriculture—in the Andean world, by the Arauco War
in Chile, and by the conquest with its attendant demographic catas­
trophe and the chimera of gold in all the Latin American countries.77
It can therefore be said that the delusion of surplus led to a confronta­
tion of social formations governed by very different constitutive
moments. The constitutive moment refers to the ultimate source of
each society, to its deep genealogy, as Hegel said, to its orginary
essentiality.
To continue along this line of reasoning, according to the general
understanding of the problem (that of the surplus), it has been deter­
mined that development can take place only where a constant and
substantial economic surplus exists. The history of Latin America
itself, however, has provided concrete examples of what we might
call the infecundity of the surplus (or at least its relative infecundity).

76 For the concept of interpellation, see Louis Althussers work.

77 Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, La población de América Latina: Desde los tiem­
pos precolombinos al año 2000 (Madrid: Alianza, 1973); Sherburne Friend
C ook and W oodrow Wilson Borah, Ensayos sobre historia de la población:
México y el Caribe (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977); available in English as:
Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971); Darcy Ribeiro, Configuraciones histórico-culturales
americanas (Montevideo: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 1972).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 45

Even Potosí emphatically proved that it is not the surplus that matters
but who appropriates it and for what. Great surpluses like that of
Argentina in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first of
the twentieth, that of Chiles nitrates and copper, even that of
Venezuela’s oil and Cuba’s heyday, attest to the absolutely supplemen­
tary role of this factor.78 The history of the period immediately prior
to the war shows how a great surplus, that of the guano boom, had
not sufficed for the construction of a nation. On the other hand,
Mexico in the period between 1910 and 1920 and then in the 30s
produced a very high level of state receptivity without the benefit of
a large surplus. Here receptivity was the result of the activity of the
society. Even Chile ultimately had demonstrated that state receptivity
is one thing and the surplus is another. Indeed, when Chile took hold
of an immense surplus, its social optimum was impoverished and it
clearly once enjoyed a considerable level of state accumulation on
the basis of a rather modest surplus.79

78 Roberto Cortés Conde, ‘El “boom” argentino: ¿una oportunidad desperdi­

ciada?’ in Tulio Halperín Donghi et al., Los fragmentos del poder: de la oligar­
quía a la poliarquía argentina (Buenos Aires: J. Álvarez, 1969), p. 217-41;
Oscar Zanetti, ‘El comercio exterior de la República Neocolonial’ in Juan Pérez
de la Riva et al., La República Neocolonial: Anuario de estudios cubanos, vol .
1 (Havana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), pp. 45-126; Héctor Malavé Mata,
Formación histórica del antidesarrollo de Venezuela (Havana: Casa de las
Américas, 1974), p. 203.
79 In fact, given that the railways did not yet compete with maritime transport,
California was closer to Chile than to the eastern United States, which proves
how relative the concept of space is. This was surely a decisive factor in Chiles
weak boom of the middle of the nineteenth century. Based for the most part
on wheat and grains, trade with Chile in California rose from US$250,195 in
1848 to US$1,835,466 in 1849 and US$2,445,868 in 1850 (Jobet, Ensayo crítico
del desarrollo económico-social de Chile, p. 35). In other words, the rapid growth
of the Chilean economy during the decades prior to the war ensured that the
crisis that followed it was experienced as something intolerable. ‘From 1848 to
1860 trade figures tripled’, ‘the urban population increased by 50 per cent’
(ibid., p. 42). Chile was the world’s top producer of copper even before the
46 # REN £ ZAVALETA MERCADO

From all this it should be clear that the concept of the surplus is
not to be privileged a priori. In a tentative analogy, it could be said
therefore that the surplus refers to absolute profit and to formal sub­
sumption, while receptivity is connected to real subsumption or the
internal or essential reorganization of the productive act. The signif­
icance of the surplus here, however, derives from the fact that it is a
requirement of large-scale reproduction which, in turn, contains the
whole logic of the new experience of time. Since it is as if men today
live many days in the space that used to occupy a single day, since
they have taken hold of time and concentrated it, they must construct
far more elaborate mechanisms so that this precarious agglutination
does not explode. A separate excursus would certainly be in order
regarding the relation between surplus and receptivity, and of both
to the structure of the state, the expansion of the state, and the theory
of mediations.80 The form in which the surplus exists and the form
of its absorption, then, determine the very succession of modes of
production. On the other hand, capitalism itself is the history of the
construction of its state or, in other words, the history of the capitalist
state is that of the production, distribution and application of the
surplus. To be precise, it is clear that the surplus does not have an
autonomous function because the optimum is composed, in reality,
of the relation between surplus and receptivity. Where there is no
receptivity, the surplus has no function. The greater the degree of
receptivity, the more we must take into account the datum of the sur­
plus. Receptivity, as we have seen, can ultimately exist even with a
meagre surplus, although with a greater degree of material social
erosion.81

conquest o f the great Bolivian deposits (Chuquicamata). In 1869, Chile

already produced 61 per cent of the worlds copper (ibid. p. 55).
80 Giacomo Marramao.
81 Peru was a typical example of a surplus that could not be made into accu­
mulation, while Chile paradoxically degraded its margin of receptivity with
the conquest of an immense surplus. The Meiji represent a case of great recep­
tivity and a precarious surplus, at least at first.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 47

This is the basis on which we can define the formal character of

the state, that is, its degree of development on the basis of the division
of surplus value.82 The model of circulation of surplus value deter­
mines the type of capitalist state. Although we cannot embark
here upon a technical analysis of the problem, it is one thing if,
for example, surplus value is largely absorbed in an essentially
non-productive moment, which is that of luxury consumption, and
another if the consumption of surplus value is fundamentally directed
towards the erection of the general capitalist and, on the whole, we
could say that appropriation primarily by the general moment of the
state or the total capitalist and by the productive moment itself tends
to coincide with a more rapid rotation of capital, which has its own
significance. It is within these parameters that we must understand
that it is not by chance that representative-democratic structures were
established in areas where there was a greater retention of the global
surplus because this also applies to the global logic of surplus value.
This has to do with the function of the optimum. We will con­
sider the national problem in greater detail below. For now, it would
be fair to say provisionally that the nation expresses the degree of
cohesion, interpenetration and intensity of civil society while the
state is political power in action (politics understood in its practical
relation to power and not as pronouncement or deliberation), whose
force in society can be either dependent upon democratic process or
arbitrary, of systemic stalemate or omnipotent. In any case, the
contemporary notion of the state cannot convincingly be reduced to
the classical model of the political state because there is a politics of
society and a politics of the state and, furthermore, there is no doubt

82 In theory, indeed, the circulatory model of surplus value should determine

the extent to which the total capitalist exists, which has to do with the total­
ization of the bourgeois class. W ithout totalization or identity neither the
expansion of the state nor organized capitalism is possible. In any case, the
state can be tax-based, as the Spanish state was, and have little pretension of
totalization; the retention of surplus value in its most general moment or that
of the state does not in itself indicate a primacy of accumulation.
• RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

that the state must act as a person in civil society to assert its auton­
omy or separation.83The modern state must then adapt to expanded
reproduction or perpetual mobility and, on the other hand, also to
the totalization of society, that is, general circulation (or the general­
ized social market). In the binary or transfigurative movement that
things in this structure tend to have, it could be said that, perhaps as
a result of the accumulation of time, a much more decisive measure
of organic solidarity or subjective interpenetration emerges here as
well as far more structural forms of contradiction, contestation and
counterhegemony. Solidarity, therefore, as well as dissent or resistance,
are inscribed with the mark of their provenance from men who com­
mand the use of their own will. The work of interaction modifies sub­
jects in relation to one another; they are reformed by one another.
This necessarily produces, at least in its prototype, a particular mode
of totalization that constitutes the unequivocal specificity of the phe­
nomena of the nation and the state in capitalism.
The very sense of time, the idea of the provisionality of the
world, that is, the expansion of circulation and generalized inter­
action, because the old particularity has been destroyed and one
cannot take refuge within what no longer exists but only in the par­
ticularity proper to the collective (no one acts for himself and the
self ultimately resides in the first person plural),84 would have trans­
lated into the simple suppression of capitalism if here the originary
construction of ideology in its new form, that is, the superstition of
the indestructibility of the state, had not taken place. The establish­
ment of consent, whether by means of an impression of power of the
state or through the seduction of a new culture, is only the extension
of the real subsumption of labour under capital. There is an element

83 In truth, the more organic the insertion or inclusion of the state in society,
the m ore consistent its autonomy founded on distance. This should not be
confused with the state that has not differentiated itself from the units of soci­
ety, that which has no choice but to act as a faction that governs arbitrarily.
84 Zavaleta, ‘Clase y conocimiento’, p. 3.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 49

of gratification that comes with the institution of the forms of medi­

ation without which totalization itself or the generalization of capi­
talism would do itself in. To invite men to be free and to interact
among themselves without mediation would be an act of self-
destruction. Hence the far more actively conservative function that
we expect of the capitalist state.85 It must, in other words, move
within a world of uncertainty—-a world uncertain but cognizable.
Mediations, in turn, like enclaves or bunkers of the state within soci­
ety and of society in the state, belong to the common expenses (and
the degree to which they are taken on as such reveals the extent to
which a bourgeois mentality has been assumed) of the circulation of
surplus value and this, at least at its initial moment, is the function
of the surplus. Rentier profits can guarantee a few years of prosperity,
but then the raison d’etat is accidental.86 No investment is ever so suc­
cessful, on the other hand, as an investment in total capital.87
The surplus, therefore, is in principle a transmitter of ideology
but it could not operate as such if at its base there did not exist a cer­
tain receptive appetite or desire, which is proper to material events
that are or are deemed to be supreme. Societies cannot live without
gods and there are certain events or dogmas that give each society its
deities. On the other hand, given that the surplus is remitted primarily

85 Clauss Offe.
86 Peruvians like Pardo used the guano surplus to abolish indigenous tribute,
which was like an attempt to win Peru its independence from the Indians.
Around 1830, indigenous and casta tribute in practice made up half of all tax
revenues (Ernesto Yepes del Castillo, Perú 1820-1920: Un siglo de desarrollo
capitalista [Lima: IEP, 1972], p. 43). The surplus conquered in the Pacific, on
the other hand, enabled the ‘Chilean experts’ [duchos de Chile] (the expression
is Mattes) to ‘win their independence from the state (Jobet, Ensayo crítico del
desarrollo económico-social de Chile, pp. 67-8).
87 The history of the relation between the Bolivian state and the tin barons,
who in practice never contributed anything, is an example of absolute non­
contribution to total capital and its consequences. They were ruined by their
own greed.
50 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

to the ruling class and only in a secondary way to the oppressed, it

cannot be thought of as something that acquires effective validity
except where it can produce a culture and knowledge linked to a sys­
tem of mediations, a system that is always local. Institutions generally
belong to the sphere of a national (and not a global) view of history.
In all cases, as we have seen, the powerful idea of the surplus blurs
into the vague but fundamental idea of receptivity. There is a relation
of species to genus and of appearance to essence between them.
The surplus is not spontaneously transformed into the substance
of the state. If this were the case, advanced states would exist wher­
ever a surplus existed. Potosí possessed a surplus that it was incapable
of appropriating and the same could be said of Spain, in an interme­
diary position in the chain.88 The surplus is conditioned by what for
Marx is an element of value: a moral-historical dimension.89 We must
now consider the importance of the fact that the quantitative limit
of the economy is a non-economic factor in a differed way. In
essence, this is a certain quality of the social, a kind of relation
between the overdetermined or the moment of the state, and the self-
determined or democratic. It is therefore something dynamic, some­
thing that must be formulated, that must evolve by trial and error. A
sudden material discovery (which is what every Latin American,
because he is an eldoradianist’, ultimately longs for) surely generates
a surplus and one that is not always used in a sensible way. However,
a surplus can also be generated through the redistribution of the

88 Pierre Vilar, A History o f Gold and Money, 1450-1920 (Judith White trans.)
(New York: Verso, 1991).
89 Both Marx and Gramsci use the term ‘m oral’, in the sense of ‘moral-
historical’ or ‘intellectual and moral reform’. This does not refer merely to the
theft of man’s labour power in the first case, or the internal form of valoriza­
tion of conduct in the second. It seems to us that in both cases it involves the
principle of action according to ends, the transformation of which ought to
be in daily life and the hegemonic internalization of the present foundations
of the social.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 51

existing product, which is the path of reform; this is feasible too but
at a higher cost. Reforms excite or move people in a way that is even
more dangerous than revolutionary measures. Finally, especially at
decisive political moments, new canons of the moral-historical mea­
sure itself can be generated, that is, there can be a moral act that
founds a new surplus. Even the appropriation of that measure, in
what can be called the negative formation of ideology, the apology
for self-plunder, can be conceived as a foundational event.90
Let us turn now to consider the behaviour of the three countries
engaged in the struggle for the surplus, which is the motivating core
of the conflict, although it is surely attended by powerful dispositions
accumulated in the social or collective unconscious91 of each. The
idea of possessing Peru or destroying what could not be possessed
of it (to possess the fortune it never had) was no doubt a bitter col­
lective compulsion in Chile92 which, moreover, proved to be an
organic people or a nation although this could not be explained by
the general market. This concept is often used as a cipher, as if it
could explain everything. But in itself it ultimately leads nowhere if
it is not integrated into a certain deliberation on the problem of the
social optimum, as a necessary theoretical matrix, and if we do not
take into account the fundamental inability of the three countries

90 On the authoritarian construction of hegemony, see the work of Erich

Fromm; H ubert Bacía, ‘La predisposición autoritaria’ (The Authoritarian
Personality) in Wolfgang Abendroth et al., Capital monopolista y sociedad
autoritaria: La involución autoritaria en la R.F.A. (Barcelona, Fontanella,
1973), p. 209; Oskar Negt, ‘Hacia una sociedad autoritaria in Abendroth et
al., Capital monopolista y sociedad autoritaria, p. 237.
91 Ernst Bloch.
92 The collective attitude towards Bolivia was no better: ‘There was soon a
general, unrestrained hatred of Bolivia among the Chilean people’ (Francisco
Antonio Encina, Resumen de la historia de Chile [Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1954],
vol . 3, p. 1411).
52 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

(and of several others):93 their patent incapability of building struc­

tures of self-determination. This means only that we must set aside
casuistic exegeses of the event such as that which would attribute its
outcome to Chile’s long diplomatic and military preparation. We
could indeed say that Chile was prepared for victory and, on the
other hand, it is as if Peru and Bolivia had prepared themselves for
defeat but, since it is not our intention to uncover genetic or social
Darwinist explanatory formulas here (because no one really desires
his own ruin, at least not in an organized way), the fact is that if Chile
prepared itself for victory, it is because it was able to do so. That is,
if it could initiate a coherent diplomatic action 30 or 40 years before
its inevitable conclusion, for example, it is because it had political
peace. If it had political peace, however, it was because its social equa­
tion or optimum (more on which later) was superior to those of its
rivals, who, on the contrary, were unable to formulate a state policy.
We have come, then, to the problem of the construction of the policy
or ideological transmission of the state. In other words, its prepara­
tion or policy is but the mode of appearing of a certain efficient rela­
tion between the power structure and man as a group, between the
form that power has assumed and the real distribution of those men
in those circumstances. The obstinacy with which all risked their

93 The war in fact marks the end of the self-determinative tendencies that
ostensibly existed in the previous Chilean state. ‘Harvey, working with North,
played a prom inent part in the operations carried out during the war
(Ramírez Necochea, Balm acedayla contrarrevolución de 1891y p. 45). There
could be no other outcome. ‘In 1889, the British dominated the vital centres
of industry’ (ibid., p. 28), Curtis, an American cited by Ramirez Necochea,
said, ‘Valparaiso, with its trade entirely controlled by the British, its market
transactions conducted in pounds sterling, its English newspaper and exten­
sive use of the language, was no more than a British colony’ (ibid., p. 39). The
great protagonists of diplomatic intrigue such as Carlos Walker Martinez, a
good friend of Baptista, and Concha y Toro, an associate of Arce, were con­
crete agents of the British. In the end, there was no doubt that Chile had made
a lot of money but that it was less a of country than it had been before.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 53

lives for the surplus and their common failure when it came to the
transformation of the surplus into self-determination, along with
certain other significant factors such as the seigneurial worldview,
indicate that these are countries that have something in common,
which perhaps has to do with a certain quality of their colonization
that we might call ‘Peruvian’.94 Of course all this should be qualified,
but certain identities can become entangled in a tragic history like
the one that transpired here. War is an atrocious mode of relation
between societies but it is a mode of relation nonetheless.
In one case after another, the idolization of the surplus is always
the same. With the level of development that the Incas had reached
and with the demographic volume that they had attained practically
overnight, the conquest itself entailed the acquisition of an unpre­
cedented surplus. The conventional indices, moreover, fail to
adequately explain a certain elasticity or capacity for sudden regen­
eration that the Peruvian economy continually displayed over the
course of its history.95 For example, independence did not devastate
the territory as it did in Upper Peru, Venezuela or Mexico. And yet
Peru had to sustain a good part if not all of the cost of the other side,

94 ‘No Spaniard came to Chile with such modest intentions. All of them were
lords or aspired to be. The West Indies were the perfect environment for a men­
tality that belonged to a feudal society in decay and in an arena too confined to
satisfy the ambitions of the many hopeful lords that were the Spanish hidalgos.
On the other hand, those who previously could not even come close to claiming
such a rank could do so the moment they set foot on American soil. All of them
viewed the Indian as a true serf destined to ennoble their new masters’ (Alvaro
Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile: La transformación de la guerra de Arauco y la
esclavitud de los indios [Santiago, Ed: Universitaria, 1971], p. 40).
95 To the point that, of this country destroyed in 1870, it could be said
that, between 1917 and 1921, ‘in contrast to what was then occurring with
other Latin American countries, Peru had no problems balancing its budget’
(Julio Cotier, Clases, Estado y nación en el Perú, [Lima: IEP, 1978], p. 143).
Exports rose from 91.6 million sols in 1913 to 269 million sols in 1919. Cotton
exports grew twentyfold between 1900 and 1919, sugar grew sixfold and cop­
per eightfold.
 54 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

that of the royalist defence, as well as Bolivars campaigns.96 The

recovery of this cost bears no comparison to the aftermath of the war
in Bolivia, which had to wait 50 years to return to the world. The
revival of the Peruvian economy following the systematic disman­
tling imposed by the war is a truly surprising event.97 Not to mention
the guano boom which constitutes in absolute terms one of the
greatest surpluses known to Latin America and perhaps the world.
Here what stands out surely is the capacity for continual reconstruc­
tion of new forms of economic surplus and, at the same time, a per­
sistent impotence when it come to its internalization or retention
(and, of course, to its transformation). In the entire century that fol­
lowed, indeed, Peru would generate new surpluses out of a devas­
tated economy but it would repeat over the course of various political
models the same inability to forge an effective nation-state.
Since Chile was a precocious state that could afford to commit the
same blunders in relation to its society as Peru, its connection to the
problem is even more eloquent. Two moments can be discerned in its
development. In the first it resembles that of Costa Rica or nineteenth-
century Colombia in some aspects (in the modest scale of the surplus),
or even twentieth-century Mexico (in the primacy of receptivity over
the surplus, strictly speaking). It is true, for example, that at the deci­
sive m o m e n tS y the British placed their bets on Chile and not Peru,
and this is what gave rise to the myth of an Anglo-Chilean victory.
In reality, the relation of dependence to England was quite similar
with Peru and Chile, with the paradoxical difference that Peru was a
more promising market.98 Chile, however, was able to pursue an

96 Yepes del Castillo, Peru 1820-1920, pp. 33,45, 46.

97 See note 95.
98 ‘Between the mid-1850s and the mid-1860s, the value of Peruvian guano

1 imported into Britain was greater than that of any other single national prod­
uct imported from Latin America’ (W. M. Matthew, ‘The Imperialism of Free
Trade: Peru, 1820-70’, Economic History Review 21 [3] [December 1968]: 563).
For 25 years, Britain maintained closer relations with Peru than with any other

________________________________________________________________________
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 55

autonomous policy within the structure of dependency, that is, in

the rupture of that moment, a certain principle of self-determination
was produced. In other words, with a modest surplus, although
within a deep framework of receptivity, Chile was able to sketch out
a state policy that cannot be explained merely as active subordination
to British interests. If we leave it at this, the plunder and slaughter of
the war would appear to be no more than one of so many atrocious
events through which countries advance, a characteristic phase of
originary accumulation in which the action of the state is decisive—
first, for the extra-economic acquisition of monetary wealth and, sec­
ond, for its transformation into capital. Chile, in fact, conquered the
spoils of the age, comparable only to Texas and the other territories
lost by Mexico." The combination of an optimal social equation in
which the state predominated over society, which is the most advan­
tageous in these circumstances (because an excess of society disor­
ganizes the process of accumulation) and an immense surplus
seemed to indicate that in this case there should have been a stable
organization of a logic of self-determination. No such thing occurred
and the Chileans themselves spoke of the ‘Peruvian malady’ [mal
peruano].'00 Victory accentuated the most reactionary elements of
the national ideological discourse, reinforced the inferiority of the
masses in relation to the state and, in short, a century later, the

Latin American country. Still, it is also true that Chile was the fifth largest
supplier of wheat to England and that in the months leading up to the war
Chile came to be a more im portant trading partner of the British than any
other country in the region with the exception of Brazil. (Hernán Ramírez
Necochea, Historia del imperialismo en Chile [Santiago: Austral, 1970)).
99 Chiles trade increased from 65,452,467 pesos in 1879 to 136,280,478 pesos
in 1890 (ibid.). Export taxes on nitrates and guano increased suddenly from
15.4 million pesos to 35.4 million pesos in 1881 (Jobet, Ensayo crítico del
desarrollo económico-social de Chile, p. 73).
100 Chile, according to González Prada, ‘was infected with the Peruvian
malady’.
56 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Chilean situation roughly resembled that of Peru during the same

period.101
As for Bolivia, the oligarchy was unable to perceive except in a
vague way the magnitude of the wealth in question, which means
that it was totally unable to retain the same economic surplus to
whose absence it would later attribute all of Bolivia’s misfortunes and
backwardness, that is, it first handed over what it would later
fetishize; that great surplus lost, the oligarchy could at least have held
its sovereign passage to viable ports as something inalienable, that
is, it could at least have preserved its effective access to the world
market given that it could not conserve its inheritance. What was
done is truly inexplicable. Those who were unwilling before, during
and after to put up a real fight, those who had no awareness of the
scale of natural resources at stake, those who lost them, which was
like losing the most extraordinary opportunity to generate a surplus
after Potosí, those same men consecrated in the juridical sphere a
loss of access in the form it took at that time and still takes now to
the world market, that is, the sea lanes. Why did they do it? For
money, that is, once again, they handed over everything in exchange
for two days’ bread. As we shall see in the following chapter, the Boli­
vian ruling class learnt nothing from this disaster and it is indeed
worth reflecting on the fact that the Gran Chaco itself, where cer­
tainly far fewer interests were at stake, precipitated a social move­
ment of greater scope and consistency.102
If we look at things in this way, since neither the victors nor the
vanquished were capable of transforming the conditions of their exis­
tence, conditions of marginality and subordination, we might speak

101 The current indices of each country, if favourable to Chile, are no more
so than those before 1879.
102 In this case, there was certainly a collective instinctual resolve that new
territories should not be lost. It is nonetheless striking that Bolivia made much
greater sacrifices for the Gran Chaco, which was practically empty, than for
the coast, which was a great source of wealth.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 57

of the gratuitousness or futility of an event that was nonetheless an

orgiastic squandering of life, passion and wealth. Yet it cannot be
denied that there was an absolute victor and here we should note that
one never vanquishes without consequences—that one does not van­
quish with impunity. It is true that even without guano or nitrates, it
took Peru only two decades to reach a situation at least similar to its
previous one; and, more importantly, the deep sense of humiliation
gave way to a moral uneasiness which characterizes the milieu out
of which figures such as [Manuel] González Prada and [José Carlos]
Mariátegui and perhaps even [Víctor Raúl] Haya [de la Torre]
emerge. An atmosphere of collective discontent and anxiety was nec­
essary for moral and intellectual personalities like Gramsci or
Mariátegui, thinkers of reconstruction, to appear. It is also true that
the patent ethico-intellectual bankruptcy of the oligarchy was a nec­
essary condition in Bolivia for the buried substrate of the nation to
be expressed through the Fearsome Willka,103 that is, perhaps this
tragedy, the confusion in which the nation lived, could only have
been followed by another upheaval. In truth, the national question
in Bolivia—Tamayos book clearly shows this104—is not articulated
explicitly at the political and intellectual levels until then. Defeat
teaches many things but it is a good school only insofar as there is a
full recovery. This, of course, has not yet happened.
Victory, in turn, as Chiles absolute victory and, to a lesser extent,
Paraguay’s illusory victory in the Gran Chaco demonstrate, can have
consequences for the construction of self-consciousness which is,
after all, the precondition for all tasks. In the case of Chile, the con­
quest of the Pacific surely led to an exacerbated validation of the
hegemony of the oligarchic core of the state. Even the masses took
to living the insidious but radical authoritarianism of its national dis­
course, of its political system, and of its state not as the inevitable

103 Condarco Morales, Zárate, el temible Willka.

104 Tamayo, Creación de la pedagogía nacional.
58 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

collective inheritance of a difficult consolidation but as a virtue in

itself. The collective deification of authority would cost Chile dearly.
*

We must now turn to the problem of the equation or result in a soci­

ety. Historical bloc, socioeconomic formation, state axis are all con­
cepts that refer to the same thing—to the felicitous or frustrated, high
or low relation between the state as the sum of all aspects of power
and civil society as the set of material conditions in which power is
produced. Returning to the problem under discussion, it should be
said that when a war takes place, it is waged not just with what one
is at that moment but with all of the history that one carries. There
is, therefore—and this is critical—an ideological engagement in the
war. One really cannot free oneself from the past except when it is
destroyed, or at least when it can be understood in its material ulti-
macy and made to serve the present instead of being its master. Since
war, like a general crisis, involves an ultimate tension or intensity of
a society’s resources, there is a confrontation of everything that each
society can muster at that moment. The shrewd capacity to concen­
trate everything that one is in an instant is what proves ones superi­
ority, and the most obvious thing about Peru and Bolivia in the War
of the Pacific is that they could not bring together what they had.
The very concept of national mobilization was alien to those coun­
tries, but it was an easy, natural and accustomed notion for Chile, for
reasons that we shall see later. Loyalty to the state became a kind of
reflex or instinct for the Chilean people following the Arauco War,
and therefore the capacity for mobilization became an internalized
habit. Bolivia’s half-hearted participation in the war, with a few thou­
sand men, represents almost the antithesis of this attitude. In the case
of Peru, it is clear that it could not base its prospects of success on
the greater prestige of its society. The War of the Pacific, then, was a
confrontation between three historical accumulations or, rather
(although this requires some qualification), the apex or end of each—
which is the state. It must be noted that there are wars that are more
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 59

properly a matter of the state and more popular wars, by which we

mean to designate the different degrees of penetration in the collec­
tive ideological formation. Of course the Manichean, statist nation
is as fallacious as the societarian or autonomist or populist idea of
the dissection of politics. The state can indeed have a more national-
popular or, as it were, more societarian determination, against less
democratic sectors of society (and, in fact, the state has on more than
one occasion been ahead of society) and, certainly, since here the
principle of centralization is felt more strongly, it can embody the
national against antinational sectors of society. Civil society, in turn,
can have a significant degree of continuity with the state. That is, a
society may have been nationalized or unified prior to the full exis­
tence of its state (the unification of society by society, which is the
opposite of the fetishism of unity), although in most cases a society’s
unification comes from a conscious act of the state, generally as a
hostile reflex against previously unified nations. In this case, the pop­
ular element was weak. We might mention the discontent of the
Chilean workers in revolt, which was ardent;105 it is also true that,
since Chile was operating from the position of an optimum that it
would never again attain to the same extent, the state would prove its
capacity to summon society, which is to say, there would be a signif­
icant popular engagement below the interpellation of the state—this
is the function of the optimum; and finally, the peasant resistance
(Caceres)106 in Peru. In any case, the central quality or feature of the
war is its interstate character. In Peru and Bolivia, it was purely an
affair of the state; in Chile, the state had the capacity to mobilize the
people psychologically and administratively. The administrative
aspect is not secondary because it must not be forgotten that Chile
always had a numerical advantage in each of its actions. This, of
course, says nothing of Peruvian or Bolivian heroism but reveals a
patent logistical incompetence.

105 Gonzalo Bulnes, Resumen de la Guerra del Pacífico.

106 Nelson Manrique, Las guerrillas indígenas en la guerra con Chile (Lima:
Centro de Investigación y Capacitación, 1981).
60 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Marx wrote that wars are not waged between countries but
between gross products. Today we can affirm that this betrays a certain
—necessary—economistic bias. Gross product is really only a valid
criterion of comparison between countries with a similar level of cap­
italist development and even then certain qualifications would have
to be made. It is, first of all, a purely statistical datum and refers only,
somewhat crudely, to the quantitative aspect of a society. A society
with a greater gross product might not have it concentrated or might
not be able to concentrate it when it wants to do so, while one with
an inferior gross product might have the ability to mobilize it effec­
tively, swiftly and at the opportune moment. Thus in this conflict
(and this approximates the logic of dependency theory) the more
powerful, the country possessing the greatest gross product, should
necessarily have won. Even with a greater gross product in absolute
terms, the social optimum can be inferior (this is the case with
Argentina at present, for example).107 In reality, then, since Peru lost
the war when it was richer than ever,108 the conflict is between dif­
ferent types of social equations or the degree to which each of them
is the bearer of an optimum. We must explain what it is that we mean
by what we have reiteratively called the social equation or optimum,
which is nothing but the relational quality of a society. We will base
our discussion on a passage from Antonio Gramsci:

107 In Argentina, the Falklands tragedy exemplifies the high price of a low
optimum in the relation between society and the state.
108 Peru exported more guano in 1876 than at almost any other year, apart
from exceptional years such 1869 and 1870, and even then it exported almost
twice as much in nitrates and triple the figure from 1870, just six years earlier.
Even sugar exports increased almost twentyfold and amounted to almost half
the income from guano. Sugar production rose from 4,500 tons in 1871 to
60,763 tons in 1878 (Luis Raúl Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica
del Perú [Lima: Imprenta Calle de Huallaga, 1882], p. 16). W hile revenues
remained constant between 1865 and 1868, spending increased from 13.36
million pesos to 20.5 million pesos (Yepes del Castillo, Perú 1820-1920,
p. 84). It was not as a result of economic inferiority that Peru lost this war.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 61

This does not mean that the tactics of assault and incursion
and the war of maneuver should now be considered to be
utterly erased from the study of military science; that would
be a serious error. But in wars among the most industrially
and socially advanced states, these methods of war most be
seen to have a reduced tactical function rather than a strate­
gic function; their place in military history is analogous to
that of siege warfare in the previous period.
The same reduction must take place in the art and sci­
ence of politics, at least in those cases pertaining to the most
advanced states, where civil society’ has become a very com­
plex structure that is very resistant to the catastrophic ‘irrup­
tions’ of the immediate economic factor (crises, depressions,
etc.): the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench
system of modern warfare. Sometimes, it would appear that
a ferocious artillery attack against enemy trenches had lev­
elled everything, whereas in fact it had caused only superfi­
cial damages to the defenses of the adversary, so that when
the assailants advanced they encountered a defensive front
that was still effective. The same thing occurs in politics
during great economic crises. A crisis does not enable the
attacking troops to organize themselves at lightning speed
in time and in space; much less does it infuse them with a
fighting spirit. On the other side of the coin, the defenders
are not demoralized; nor do they nor do they abandon their
defensive positions, even in the midst of rubble; nor do they
lose faith in their own strength of their own future. This is
not to say that everything remains intact----
And finally:
In the East the State was everything, civil society was primor­
dial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation
between State and civil society, and when the state tottered,
a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed.
62 • R E N t ZAVALETA MERCADO

The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a suc­

cession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.109
Here Gramsci offers a brilliant analysis of the ‘immortal*,
crystallizing, ossifying nature of ideological superstructures, of their
persistent tendency to ratify and sustain themselves. This is really
not only valid for the superstructures of capitalism, where it is more
visible as a result of expanded reproduction, but for all systems:
superstructures—law, ideology, the state itself—are made in relation
to or oriented towards the source of their determination, not to trans­
form but to preserve it. In this sense, law and the state are always
conservative. Of course, just as in capitalism, the state must adapt to
a perpetually moving base, it must also act through methods of
reading or methods of social knowledge such as political democracy
in this sense. The trench system is thus nothing but the set of medi­
ations, structures and supports through which civil society exists
before the state and the political state before civil society, that is, the
intermediate phase without which the conscious will of politics or
power (the state) and society (the space of production of the condi­
tions of a political will or of its reception) cannot know one another.
It is also clear, moreover, that when we speak of the external surface
of the state, we refer to its old form of violent coercion or repressive
apparatus while the effective line of defence is the space of the perpe­
tuity or tenacity of its ideological constitution, the hegemonic core.110
In this master metaphor of the modern state, there is, however,
more than one arguable point. We would have to distinguish, for
example, between states of long duration and situations of state flu­
idity, such as those proper to the apparent state. It is absolutely true
that the assailants* do not organize themselves immediately because
they are themselves immersed and absorbed within bourgeois

109 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio

Callari eds and trans) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), vol . 3,
pp. 162-3,169.
110 See Michel Foucault.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS # 63

hegemony and its discourse; they exist in a relation of internality, of

belonging, or of inseparability to the hegemonic discourse. Their life,
simply put, cannot be conceived outside of the hegemonic radius.
The tru th p rin c ip le m fails here because both its assailants and its
defenders deeply believe in the truth of the state.
This is most rigorously applicable to the advanced capitalist state.
Its defenders who believe deeply a n d are not dem o ra lized are what
Hegel called th e general classy or the bureaucracy in a basic sense, as
the bearer of the secret of the state or ideology for itself. [Augusto]
Pinochet, of course, at the moment of the coup, felt himself to be the
bearer of that self-certainty of the state. The assailants, therefore, are
dominated not only by force as violence (which also exists) but,
above all, by the memory of force, which is ideology, generalized
discipline. The state here is the superego 112of civil society; it contains
the collective memory of what is called the real subsumption of
labour under capital or formal subsumption, that is, the sacrifice of
the autonomy of the state o f separation to the despotic power of pro­
ductive capital.11213
We consider the premise that capitalist societies are more com­
plex than precapitalist societies to be patently false. It is true that cap­
italism multiplies social time but it is no less true that it homogenizes,
standardizes society. Ultimately, national classes, the nation itself,
vast, relatively uniform social units, are proper to capitalism and, in
this sense, any backward society is more heterogeneous and complex
than a capitalist society.
Therefore, although Gramsci fails to consider this fact (he omits
it; he does not deny it), the general validity of this apothegm on the
state must be based upon a kind of simultaneous and homogeneous
determination of the superstructure by the economic base or civil
society. In reality, the moment of determinative efficacy of civil society

111 See Foucault.

112 That is, the internalized authority of the voice of the father.
113 Zavaleta, ‘Cuatro conceptos de la democracia’.
64 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

is heterogeneous, that is, it is above all an erratic result in complex

or motley societies, in illegible societies. Even in capitalist societies
simplified by industrialization, the determinative moment is at least
sequential or mobile, and here, if the impediment of incalculability
is absent (and the proof of this is representative democracy), the state
must still adjust to the aleatory determination proper to expanded
reproduction.
What seems most questionable is the premise that civil society
in the East was primitive and gelatinous’ in comparison with the
robust character of civil society in the West. It has been said that here
Gramsci uses the term East in a metaphorical sense, although in any
case it is a metaphor with a proper name. It is a culturalist exagger­
ation to suppose that capitalism exists in Europe because it is West­
ern. In this case, there could be no mode of capitalism but that of the
West. Gramsci’s statement can be interpreted to mean that the polit­
ical state is powerful where it results from a farmer path,114 or from
the free choice of juridically free men. This distinction is important.
If it is true that freedom is the necessary condition of capitalism, a
man can be free as one who has received his freedom from the state,
as one who has conquered his own freedom before the state, or as
one whose freedom has determined the mode of existence of the state.
In all three cases, the precondition—the formation of free men—is
wholly fulfilled. Nonetheless, the spirit with which this common con­
dition is experienced is different in each case.
In any event, the strength or robustness of the state is gauged
only in relation to the civil society to which it refers, and vice versa.

114 Lenin: ‘The peasant [ . . . ] becomes the sole subject of agriculture and is
gradually transformed into the capitalist farmer (‘The Agrarian Question in
Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century’) [Translated from the
Spanish. This reference is untraceable.—Trans.]. This has to do with the mode
of constitution of the free individual. In other words, a ‘pact’ between free
individual smallholders is one thing, and it is quite another if the peasants are
subjugated, by debt or in any other way, even if they have been granted juridi­
cal ‘freedom’.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 65

What matters here is the degree of intensity or correspondence. The

mere ascendency of the state over society does not constitute an opti­
mum but the paralysis or circular life that Marx called Asiatic despo­
tism. Conversely, the mere unorganized supremacy of society over
the state constitutes only an aleatory relation and can disorganize or
negate all politics, good or bad. Thus the supremacy of society (at
least) or the absorption of the state by society that is assumed to be
a progressive feature of socialism constitutes a specific kind of
supremacy of the latter over the former and does not refer to all
supremacy.
We can set aside the somewhat culturalist sense that resides in the
letter of this paragraph. It goes without saying that the optimum in
its paradigmatic form emerged in the United States, strictly speaking
not a Western state, unless the term refers to the originary stock in a
racial sense, and then it would be unclear why the same culture
would function badly in Latin American hands, o f‘Western’ descent
in this sense, and well in the hands of Anglo-Saxons, equally West­
ern, unless mestizaje had the effect of weakening the political conse­
quences of Western blood. It is obvious, moreover, that it would be
mistaken to think of Norway or Portugal as more instructive in the
history of capitalism in the world than Japan. Bearing in mind our
whole previous digression, we must also take into account European
and North American privilege in the appropriation of the global sur­
plus, which in itself does not explain the capitalist state, although it
certainly made it viable.
We know, however, what Gramsci meant at the core of his rea­
soning. There is no doubt an often forgotten sequence from the abo­
lition of the old collectivity or at least its reorientation towards the
consecration of the juridically free individual, in its two phases, as
man unbound from the soil and as citizen, and the constitution of
the capitalist model of intersubjectivity, which differs from somatic
homogeneity in that here what homogeneity there is is the fruit of
the transferable interaction from the general market. The very sepa­
ration of the state from society is possible only on the basis of the
66 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

concept of the total capitalist, which, in turn, refers to a specific pat­

tern in the circulation of surplus value. Therefore, if this is the nec­
essary prodrome of the relative autonomy of the state, it is true that
the relation of symmetry or reinforcement in the equation, which is
what we are here calling the optimum, is impossible, or it is possible
only to a lesser extent so long as these particular forms of interaction
and this degree of independence of the state, which is a product of
the more general and less and private appropriation of surplus value
as well as of democratic knowledge of society, are not present. This,
in our view, is what we may learn from this absolutely decisive anal­
ogy offered in the thought of Antonio Gramsci.
*

What we are calling the optimum is of course a metaphor and in real­

ity it can only be approximated. In any case, even if it exists, it does
not exist once and for all but is something that is gained and lost.
There is in every equation an inherent tendency towards a loss of
equivalence between the two terms. A typical example might be the
dramatic difference between the Russian formations of the two world
wars.115 In the case under discussion, there is no doubt that, of the
three countries that took part in the conflict, Chile possessed a
greater social equation than its adversaries. The difference in the
national product, if it gave some slight advantage to Chile, was not
significant. Or at least not militarily significant. It is a fact that Bolivia
and Peru had far greater populations. Even if we concede the military
advantage resulting form the superiority of its preparation and equip­
ment, the Chilean victory, if we adhere to these indices, should have
been, in theory, far more difficult and less crushing than it was. In
military terms, it is said that a victory of such proportions should be
the result either of an overwhelming superiority or of some abso­
lutely decisive stroke of luck. Neither of these things occurred and

115 O r also, o f course, the radical difference between Baptistas soldiers and
the volunteers in South Africa or Ethiopia.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 67

our analysis of this history leads us to seek more structural and con­
stant causes.
‘Chile,’ [Oswald] Spengler once wrote, ‘is a robust state.’ Let us
leave aside for now the general question of the state in Chile and
reduce the exposition to its elements or essence. Whether Chile was
or was not then already a robust state remains to be seen; in reality,
it is demonstrable, rather, that the Chilean state was capable then and
there of constructing a state policy, which in turn was able to engage
the entire society, to lead it towards the objective of war. It is perhaps
worth pausing to consider this question, that of the construction of
a state policy. With states as with individuals, decisions that are in
fact imposed by circumstance or external conditions are often
attributed to the will of their executors; in some cases, the subjective
support for the decision might even believe itself to be resolving
something that in reality has been determined by events.11617
This is particularly true for the world of the periphery, the pro­
letarian nations.1,7 As we have seen, the problem of receptivity is
always decisive. In normal circumstances, they are countries that lack
receptivity, that is, self-determination. This emerges under certain
conditions, such as in moments of conflict between core countries,
or through the social receptivity that results from a general crisis or
the seizure of an unforeseen surplus.118 What we call the economic
policy’ of these countries is often no more than the sum of measures
demanded by the hegemonic core. This is of course relative. Every
society, even the weakest and most isolated, always possesses some

116 This is the problem o f what we m ust call illusory self-determination,

widely present in apparent states.
117 Pierre Moussa, Les nations Prolétaires (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1959).
118 The most spectacular surpluses of this century in Latin America are that
of Argentina, as of 1890; that of Venezuela, after 1940; and that of Mexico,
after 1975. The highest revenues in Peru’s history are attained in the decade
of 1870-80 (Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y burguesía en el Perú [Lima: IEP, 1974],
P- 139).
68 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

margin of self-determination, but such a society is utterly incapable

of exercising it unless it knows the conditions or particularities of its
dependency. In other words, each national history creates a specific
model of autonomy, but it also engenders a particular mode of
dependency. One of the most striking features of Chile at that time
is the aptitude of its ruling class for an accurate analysis of the kind
of dependency that governed its relations with the core countries119
and, on the other hand, a knowledge of the degree of social recep­
tivity to determination by the state. Self-determination in any case
cannot mean the disappearance of external constraints; it means,
rather, the elaboration of ones own objective or will within a set of
external constraints, that is to say, these can be eluded insofar as they
are known. Knowledge of the world and a realistic view of oneself
are the absolute prerequisites of self-determination. In this sense,
moments of self-determination in Bolivia, for example, have always
been rare.120 Ultimately, telic consciousness, or, in more common
terms, sovereignty in determining its own ends, is the object of state.

119 Despite the fact that the state had ownership of Peru’s guano since 1840
and its nitrates since 1878, despite the fact that all loans had been controlled
by the state, this did not proffer a privileged position in relation to Chile.
‘Harvey, working in partnership with North, occupied a special place in the
operations carried out during the war’ (according to Ramirez Necochea’s
account [Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891, p. 45]). To some extent at
least, British capital would favour Chiles acquisition of the deposits and then
decide what to do with Chile itself. Indeed: ‘John Thomas N orth had con­
tributed a sum of 100,000 pounds sterling [to the anti-Balmacedists]’ (ibid.,
p. 192). A British trading company, one of whose centres was the Gibbs house,
maintained that a Chilean victory could be beneficial in the long term because
this republic was the m ost efficient and energetic of the South American
Pacific. (Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 1822-1933, VOL. 8, p. 30).
So it is not that the British decided the war in Chile’s favour but that they
immediately understood Chile would inevitably win.
120 The m om ent o f greatest receptivity was certainly 1952, when the MNR
rose to pow er despite the disapproval o f the United States. The lowest,
perhaps, with the immediate loss of that receptivity, was reached in 1956 when
Jackson Eder com m andeered the political life of the state.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS # 69

It is clear that not every state is capable of formulating policies

and, of course, few can sustain them and carry them through. The
diktat in itself reveals an attitude of confidence in the conformity of
the social body or in the states ascendency over it. This is why in
countries like ours, it is crucial to thoroughly examine the question
of what has been called the apparent state. In too summary a fashion,
it can be defined as equivalent to Lenin’s notion of the semicolony.121
As a state, a colony does not exist because its territory, its population
and what could be its political power are in foreign hands. A semi­
colony, on the other hand, possesses an illusory sovereignty over all
three. For Lenin, it refers to countries with political independence
that are economically dependent. Obviously, the political and the
economic cannot be separated like this. Where a certain degree of
economic sovereignty does not exist, there can be no political
sovereignty, etc. In any case, there is no doubt that the Latin American
countries, which are the founders of political independence in the
periphery, share this characteristic: they have had constitutions but
no constitutional moment; the state form as a whole (although the
form itself here is part of the history of its content) resembles that
of advanced states; in short, they appear to be Western (in the Euro­
centric sense of the term) in all respects but somehow they are not.
What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ulti­
mately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the
world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now. This must
be taken with due caution. Still, we are speaking of states in which
what predominates, if not total dependency, which sometimes exists
for long periods of time, is at least an incomplete self-determination
(keeping in mind that absolute self-determination is a theological
idea); they have only a vague sense of self-certainty, that is, identity.
We can therefore also call them uncertain states.122

121 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage o f Capitalism (1917), in Selected

Works, VO L. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 667-776.
122 Non-self-determination is a problem of identity. In other words, one who
does not have the desire for self-determination in this age lacks visibility and
70 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Chile had a surprising capacity for the construction of a political

programme. Our task here is to ascertain the nature, origin and end
of that programme. The fascinating figure of Diego Portales illus­
trates this process.123
It is a case in which the temperament of a man became the char­
acter of a nation or, as it were, the personality of a nation was revealed
in the character of a man. There is no doubt that the mimetic or
seductive relation between societies and states is of great importance.
If we consider the seduction of El Dorado,124 it is true that Chile
defined itself as a project in the image of Peru or, rather, Potosí,125

therefore recognition by those who should be ones fellows. This kind of

renunciation of sovereignty is perhaps the most aberrant feature of the polit­
ically and economically dom inant classes in Latin America.
123 Let us leave aside the idea that Chile could be explained by the predom ­
inance o f ‘Castilian-Basque’ ancestry, espoused by Francisco Antonio Encina.
In any case, it is true that Portales very clearly expressed something that had
been silently developing within that society. The characteristic combination
o f legality and authoritarianism, the formation of impersonal power and the
constitution of a certain degree of independence of the state in relation to the
special apparatus’ of repression are surely part of Portales’ legacy. But so are
the very conditions of impossibility of the utopia or national ethos that he
founded. He defined Chile’s sovereignty in relation to Peru and Bolivia, not
in relation to the world; conceived of success solely in terms of surplus; and,
finally, believed that Chile’s purpose was to ‘affirm the conquests of European
civilization (Resumen de la historia de Chile, vol. 2, p. 834).
124 Sanabria Fernández, En busca de El Dorado; Sozina, En el horizonte está
El Dorado; Romano and Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno, p. 178.
125 In a famous letter to Blanco Encalada, then head of the Chilean naval and
military forces against the Confederation, Portales wrote these telling words:
‘We cannot view but with apprehension and the greatest alarm the existence
of two confederated peoples who, ultimately, given their common provenance,
language, habits, religion, ideas, and customs, will naturally form a single
nucleus’; it was a m atter of impeding what Chile had done early on, because
‘those two states united [ . . . ] would always be greater than Chile’ and this ‘as
a result of its greater white population’ and ‘its greater num ber of learned
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 71

which was the secret of Lima and then, long after, of Charcas. The
truth is that every nascent state is born in relation to another state
or paradigm or tendency. It must be something desirable, but not
remote. Such is the function of alterity for the state. One cannot
found oneself in relation to oneself. The other for Chile was always
Peru. Chile, a state constituted against the Indians, in spite of the
Indians, and excluding the Indians; Peru, a state built on the backs
of the Indians and therefore with a concupiscent tolerance for them;
Chile, a state fashioned out of a frugal surplus; Peru, the paragon of
a surplus without a state. Peru (which in this ideologeme includes
Potosí), the locus of vast natural resources, and Chile, endowed with
limited natural resources, at least for the period. All of this is, ulti­
mately, illusory because time proved that the most important source
of natural wealth in Bolivia then was that which it lost.
Portales said that power in Chile is sustained by ‘the weight of
night’.*126 Herein lies the essence of the authoritarianism of the
Chilean state. If the people is awake, democracy is not possible.
Democracy is founded on the force of night, that is, the slumber of
the people. Here we have an early theorist of the social market state.
Authoritarianism, however, is only of consequence if it is converted
into power; without this, it is no more than a feeling. A state, in effect,
can only formulate policy within the sphere of its ideological or at
least its actual reach, as the actualization of something that exists as
a potentiality or virtuality in the administrative and repressive appa­
ratus, because the state is itself plus the radius of its legitimacy or
authority. If it is true that to be is to choose oneself, as André Gide
once wrote, the production of policy has to do with the logic of ends

white men in Lima with ties to the Spanish families’ (quoted in Basadre, His­
toria de la república del Perú 1822-1933, vol. 2, p. 149).
126 The full passage is richer: ‘The social order in Chile is maintained through
the weight of the night and because we have no keen, astute, and discerning
men; the general tendency of the masses towards repose is the guarantee of
public peace (letter from Portales to Joaquim Tocornal, 17 May 1832).
72 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

without which the state would respond only to the instinct of self-
preservation of the strongest. History would be a stupid, continuous
line in which the powerful always prevail. The capacity to imagine
or a kind of telos is what distinguishes man from spider because he
weaves towards a preconceived object.127 Hence we must infer the
conscious substantiality of the state, that is, if the state has no self-
consciousness or self-certainty, it is not a state but a factual conse­
quence of the confrontations, hostilities and pacts between anomic
groups in civil society.128 If utopian action can respond to a future
determination (not effective in the present), certainly the optimum
requires a selection of possible objects and apposite means, that is,
the call to action must be something underlying or latent in the social
equation. Therefore, if the true production of politics is like the self-
determination of the subject, it is in fact also the expansion of the
social subject. This does not depend only on free will in the sense
that to be is to choose oneself, but to do so successfully. Why, then,
was Chile, that Chile, able to produce a state policy while Peru and
Bolivia achieved only its simulacra? Bolivia struggled just to remain
where it was. Surely it attempted a to produce a policy, but its 10 cents
per quintal of nitrate not only provoked the war but also led to its
condition of geographic inferiority.129 Peru, in turn, tried belatedly

127 ‘A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a

bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its
honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of
bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in
wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges that had already
been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally’
(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 284).
128 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy o f Right (T. M. Knox trans.) (London: Oxford
University Press, 1979[ 1952]), §270: ‘The state [ . . . ] knows what it wills and
knows it in its universality, i.e. as something thought. Hence it works and acts
by reference to consciously adopted ends, known principles, and laws which
are not merely implicit but are actually present to consciousness.’
129 ‘The Antofagasta Nitrate Company founded with Chilean and British cap­
ital was granted special privileges by the Bolivian government to exploit the
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 73

to nationalize its nitrate fields.130 Chile, meanwhile, instituted a policy

that consisted in overcoming its relative inferiority and the conquest
of a surplus that was like the spoils of the age. As far as Chile could
see given the limits of its field of vision, these ends were achieved.
Whether it was all an illusion—whether success in the end was indis­
tinguishable from failure—is another question.131 We must insist,

nitrates discovered near the port of La Chimba (Antofagasta). In 1873, the

company built the first railroad in Bolivian territory to facilitate the transport
of nitrates from the deposits of Salar del Carmen to the Antofagasta port. Just
a few years later, in 1879, the nitrate tax levied by the Bolivian government
(10 cents per quintal) provoked the ire of the Nitrate Company and unleashed
the War of the Pacific. A few months later, the Bolivian coast was occupied
by Chilean forces. With the war over, the Chilean government, attentive to
the interests of foreign and domestic capital, ordered a classified study of
mining and agricultural conditions in the provinces of Lipez and Sud Chichas
in the interior of Bolivia with the decree of 22 May 1882. In 1884, the govern­
ment of the Bolivian oligarchy signed a truce with Chile in the fourth article
of which it was established that the products of each country could be freely
imported to the other. With this measure, Chile won a new victory, this time
economic, since it was clear that Bolivia could export nothing but its minerals.
Thus the conquest of Bolivian markets was methodically prepared. The
Antofagasta Nitrate Company took the next step, initiating the construction
of the railroad towards the postwar border in occupied territory, without con­
sulting the Bolivian government. The regime of the m ining oligarchy took
preparatory steps, raising duties on products imported from Peru by 30 per
cent. This measure, intended to benefit Chile, was a hard blow for trade in
the northern districts and further degraded relations with their allies from
the war of 1870’ (Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata, p. 165).
130 In 1875 (Ramírez Necochea, Historia del imperialismo en Chile). The
nitrate fields had already belonged to the state since 1840 (Heraclio Bonilla,
Guano y burguesía en el Perú, p. 165). Even the loans were all overseen by the
Peruvian state. In theory, therefore, a large surplus such as had seldom been
seen was at the disposal of the state.
131 Each of the three countries went through an economic crisis in its own
way. Bolivia really suffered only the exacerbation o f a destitution that was
perhaps indistinguishable from a virtual economic nonexistence before the
world. Peru had created its own crisis. Chile, meanwhile, attempted a fuite en
74 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

however, that such an achievement cannot be explained solely on the

basis of the indisputable preparedness or ascendency acquired since
the capture of the Huáscar or even by a kind of privileged position
in relation to British interests. It is something founded on the level
or potentiality of the social optimum, surely more efficient than
those of its rivals. It was Chiles history, at that moment, that had
readied itself to defeat Peru and Bolivia. We must consider the
essence of the event and not its phenomenon.
Chiles constitutive moment, as a state and as a nation, is deter­
mined by the Arauco War just as the Nile is Egypt’s ultimate cause
and constitutive moment and the combination of the price revolu­
tion, the black plague and depeasantization is England’s. O f course
it would be absurd to attribute the determination of the emergence
of a society or of a state to a precise moment or even a central cause.
It is true, and has been proven in practice, that a process of gradual
and even conscious accumulation can supplement the nonexistence
of such a moment or irruption, which is decisive either for its precise
location in time, which gives it its visibility in the future, or for its
momentousness, as with the Nile or Andean agriculture. It is, more­
over, a typical ex-post notion, in that we can know with some certainty
what the originary moment of a society is but not how future

avant (and succeeded): ‘The economic crisis that had reached its peak with
the declaration of the inconvertibility of banknotes in 1878 came to an unex­
pected end with the War of the Pacific. And we say that it came to an unex­
pected end because with the war the country came into possession o f vast
resources’ (Daniel Martner, cited in Jobet, Ensayo crítico del desarrollo
económico-social de Chile, p. 65). This is indisputable, for Chile conquered the
world’s only natural nitrate deposits. The direct prelude was, first, the Peruvian
stagnation of 1873 and the subsequent expropriation of the nitrate fields in
1878. ‘These events [the Peruvian crisis and expropriation] are those which
established for the Chilean capitalist class the need to conquer the nitrate fields
as a solution to the economic and financial crisis that was ruining the country’
(ibid., p. 64). According to Alberto Edwards, ‘without the War of the Pacific,
the Pinto government might well have ended in a revolution’ (cited in ibid.).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS # 75

societies, through a weaving that remains inscrutable, will be con­

stituted. It is true that to have a constitutive moment that is conspic­
uous and in a sense decisive (because it defines the character of the
society for a long time to come), visible to and shared by the entire
people, is initially beneficial. But the history of a country is often the
result of more than one constitutive moment, although one consti­
tutive moment can be more profound, more radical and ancestral
than others. This, which proves at first to be an advantage, can in
fact be an obstacle to the attainment of the most suitable form for
the fulfilment of what we might call the tasks of the age; a deep-
rooted identity can obstruct the formation of a new identity.
The concept of the constitutive moment refers to the formation
of a society’s essential discourse. Our previous discussion of the con­
cept of receptivity is instructive for its understanding. A constitutive
moment must be something potent enough to interpellate an entire
people or at least certain strategically important groups within it
because it must bring about a replacement of beliefs, a universal sub­
stitution of loyalties, in short, a new horizon of visibility. If we
attribute so integral a symbolic function to this moment, it is because
it is from here that the social cement’ that is the ideology of a society
is derived or founded.132 It is one of the most persistent social facts,

132 Gonzalez Prada said that ‘Chile was infected with the Peruvian malady.’
This seems to be corroborated by the following facts: ‘the nitrate region was
transform ed into a British factory. Through it and through the supremacy
that the British had achieved in the economic life of the country prior to the
War of the Pacific, Chiles total subordination to British imperialism was
secured’ (Ramirez Necochea, Historia del imperialismo en Chile, p. 103).
‘A round 1890, the British dominated the main towns of the north, especially
those of Tarapaca, exercising an unchecked influence in that province’ (ibid.,
p. 102). Note that it is a date very close to the end of the war.
The national subordination of this same state that had been capable of
setting its own objectives was obvious, that is, the Chilean optimum had dete­
riorated. ‘Valparaiso [ . . . ] with its trade entirely controlled by the British, its
market transactions conducted in pounds sterling, its English newspaper and
76 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

to the point that we might say that the constitutive ideology often
cuts across several modes of production and historical periods. Yet
the omnipresence of this moment cannot mean the absolute hege­
mony of the past or origin. Over the course of this study we will see
the role assigned not only to the principle of selection in history,
which is the foundation of anthropocentrism, but also to comple­
mentary constitutive moments, to the flux of historical reform within
an originary movement.133
Chile, then, was blessed with a sharply delineated constitutive
moment, and one that included the whole of society and supplied the

extensive use of this language, was no more than a British colony’ (Ramirez
Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891, p. 39).
Harvey himself declared to the Financial Times that a conversation of a
few minutes between the Chilean minister and a man with the capability of
Colonel North would be sufficient for the purpose’ (ibid., p. 55)
W hether such subordination was a general fact or not is still open to
question, but it did not exist to this extent prior to the Chilean victory. What
is indisputable is the contagion of the ‘Peruvian virus’ in the form of political
corruption: Gonzalo Bulnes, for example, ‘took advantage of his position as
governor of Trapacé to carry out major nitrate deals in the province that had
been entrusted to his governance’ (Resumen de la Guerra del Pacífico, p. 27).
An account in El Tarapacá (28 August 1886) makes clear that this had not
been common practice before: ‘This is the first time that a civil servant has
given up his post to devote himself to business affairs that had previously been
w ithin the domain of the state.’
Afterwards, this conflation of the positions of partner of the British or
o f the capitalists and civil servants would become increasingly frequent. This
reveals a growing erosion of the relative autonomy of the Chilean state that
would reach its peak when Jorge Alessandri, one of the Chilean millionaires,
became president, which already implies a complete abandonment of the con­
ventions o f the Chilean oligarchy in the tradition of Portales. At the same time,
it is telling that a population that had increased between 1843 and 1865 at a
rate o f 2.35 p er cent would slow its growth rate to 1 per cent between 1865
and 1907—a not a result o f demographic modernization but of poverty.
133 See E rnst Bloch, Sujeto-Objeto: El pensamiento de Hegel (Mexico City:
FCE, 1949).
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 77

early elements of its precocious acquisition of an efficient social equa­

tion. That moment was the Arauco War or, rather, the encounter
between the colonization of Peru (seigneurial at its core; Pizarro said:
‘Here one goes to Peru to get rich,’ that is, to be a señor)134 and the cir­
cumstances surrounding the Arauco War. ‘In Chile of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, it would be difficult not to perceive the
pervasive militarism that seemed to dominate all of society.’135
This was true from the beginning. Already in the fifteenth cen­
tury, the priest Diego de Rosales had described Chile as the Flanders
of the Indies. As Alvaro Jara aptly says—and we will follow his account
throughout this exposition—it was effectively a clash between a col­
onization at once seigneurial and private and the pre-state organiza­
tional and military forms of the Araucanians. We might say, rather,
that it is a question of the failure of the Spaniards in that encounter.
If the number of hidalgos was in itself very high within the
Spanish population of the time, the demeanour of the ‘second sons’,136
along with their subordinate status and their vast numbers, set the
seal on things. ‘All were lords or aspired to be’ and ‘those who had
not even remotely been gentlemen, upon setting foot on American
soil claimed that rank’.137
From then on, the set of mediations of the three societies,
although in different ways, would be founded on the seigneurial prin­
ciple, which will be discussed later. If the conquest of Chile is heir to
the conquest of Peru, the conquistadores with their already Peruvian-
ized minds encountered an indomitable social structure there.138

134 Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Pizarro (Lima: Ed. Pizarro, 1978).

135 Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile, p. 13.
136 Romano and Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno, pp. 185-6.
137 Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile, p. 40.
138 Jara refers to ‘the absence of a chief or king to lead them [the Araucanians]:
if in one sector there was peace, others would remain outside the accords,
since there was no single authority to rule them all; or, rather, if several groups
made peace, this could not last for the same reason (ibid., p. 48). This is also
78 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

The war in effect became endless and interminable.139 The devel­

opment of the state in Mexico or in Peru, which was clearly despotic,
favoured a logic of conquest because here, once its peak was cap­
tured, the entire pyramid set to obeying as it had before.140 Since
Araucanians had no general organization but only military alliances,
this led to a kind of indefinite multiplication of the centres of society
and consequently to the futility of peace because what was agreed
upon by some was not valid for others. In terms of defence, therefore,
here society would acquire a contingent consistency as a result of its
instability or, as it were, the military form of a mobile, scattered state.
The first consequence of this is that war itself is modernized. A
long war always entails a certain modernization of warfare. Not just
because of the adoption of cavalry by the Araucanians, who are said
to have assembled 3,000 horses and 5,000 foot soldiers in one battle
(in Purén), but also through their collective military ingenuity with
tactics like that of the ‘hedgehog’ (clusters of spikes as a trap for the
cavalry). The Spaniards, in any case, did not yet use infantry, at least
not in its later sense, when cavalry had become useless.

relatively valid for the Chiriguanos. Still, without facing the same danger of
exterm ination as the first Spanish colonies in Chile, for the inhabitants of
eastern Charcas, the consequences in terms of provocation o f the state were
less serious as a result of the support of Charcas and Lima, which was imme­
diate, and because of the greater spatial dispersion or lower numerical
concentration of indigenous aggression.
139 Ibid., p. 21.
140 This is almost an established principle: the greater the state consciousness,
the less individualist consciousness there is in m ilitary resistance (because
this does not apply to the economic). ‘Where Indian resistance was scarce or
insufficient, the indigenous com m unity survives—arduously—to this day
(Romano and Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno, p. 183). On the
other hand: ‘Its efficiency (that of the conquest] was greater in those territories
in which the indigenous masses, as a result of their greater social development,
had been subjected to a social and productive regime that compelled them to
render a surplus to the ruling caste’ (Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile, p. 19)
which, o f course, was not the case with Chile or with any frontier region.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 79

Jara notes, on the other hand, the private character of the con­
quest inherent to what was called the hueste indiana, a private enter­
prise with a necessary seigneurial tendency at its core. In those
conditions it was clearly impossible for ‘the conquerors-turned-
encomenderos141 to successfully shoulder so heavy a burden over so
many years.’142
But it was not just an offensive failure; what was at stake was the
very survival of the new community, now undeniably besieged. The
rebellion that began in 1598 destroyed the seven existing cities and
the whole of the south was recovered by the Indians. We must ask
what role such a brutal, imminent, and global threat plays, for the
Araucanian objective was clear: the Spaniards, ‘subjects and slaves,
obeying the Indians as their lords, and the Indians, ruling like mas­
ters and proprietors.’143 The answer to this is the emergence of the
state whose point of origin is the army: ‘Then, and only when the
abyss was opening, a state army paid for entirely with public funds
as had long been the norm in Europe was created.’144
In what did this opening of the abyss consist? In a willingness to
accept whatever was necessary for the survival of that which was

141 [Spanish soldiers or officials to whom a specified number of indigenous

inhabitants of an area (an encomienda) was entrusted’. The encomendero was
formally charged with the protection of the population and exacted tribute.]
142 Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile, p. 72. The problem lies always in the
transformation of (private) pacts into a (public) frontier army. The ideological
institution of the category of the public is essential in understanding the m od­
ern state, because civil society is the private sphere that, although it contains
state substance in potentia, has not yet assumed a public or state form. ‘The
conquest was conditioned by its private nature, one that has largely persisted’
(ibid.). This means that it was not Spain that carried out the conquest but
gangs of second sons commanded by outsiders.
143 Sg. Alonso de Ovalle (Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile, p. 45).
144 Ibid., p. 116. The indigenous rebellion (that of 1598) ended in the
destruction of the seven cities, and the entire south was recovered by the
Indians’ (ibid., p. 45).
80 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

threatened, that is, of that society that even if in the most embryonic
way nonetheless possessed the elements of its initial recognition. On
the other hand, the claim that war forced the substitution of the pri­
vate nature of the hueste indiana by the national and state army car­
ries important implications. The seigneurial privileging of the private
sphere gives way here to the requirements of a national form of
repression, because in absolutism the state precedes the nation.
We find in these passages, cursory as they are, traces of the
Chilean optimum. We can say then that a general war organized the
components of Chiles constitutive crisis. The frontier army becomes
the foundation of the future Chilean state, a fact that is significant in
itself.145The nucleus of a society’s constitutive determination defines
things and distinguishes them from one another. An originary inter-
subjective act constituted by agriculture or the logic of the councils,
for example, is not the same thing as one constituted by a military
imperative to rule and obey because the price of not doing so is anni­
hilation. Men do not change their habits without good reason and
those men (those of the hueste indiana) who had come to be their
own masters in the seigneurial utopia of the time would not have
accepted the implacable and precocious logic of the regular army if
not for an urgency that prevailed over any kind of belief. This is the

145 W hich means that the constitutive act is war, and, therefore, in the core
ideological discourse, it would refer in the future to the logic of war. Hence,
it makes a difference whether the constitutive act is a charismatic or messianic
moment, if it is an act of submission or negative war, or an act of victory, active
war, or war directed outwards. Moreover, the m ode of the ‘frontier arm y’,
which is a consequence of the frontier mentality, in turn organizes its own
economy: ‘A far-from-trivial market for the consumption of the products of
the creole economy, since the last quarter of the sixteenth century and espe­
cially as o f 1600, was constituted by the frontier army’ (ibid., p. 37). In other
words, the state is born of its repressive apparatus or army; the army exists
outw ardly and not inwardly; and, finally, the economy is produced by the
state.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 81

‘deep crisis’146 of the sixteenth century on which Chile is founded.

The very fact that the Mapuche even today speak o f‘the Chileans’ is
proof that the process of national integration in Chile excluded them.
This blocks the most divisive aspects of the hueste Indiana (‘within
the seigneurial style of creole society, no one prided himself on being
a soldier, and everyone wanted to be a captain’).147
It was, however, a transformation and not a substitution or erad­
ication. This is the characteristic fusion of the Chilean formation. If
the principle of compliance, of obedience, is a deeply ingrained
feeling, general and unshakable, this only transposes the individual
habit of seigneurial rivalry to the collective plane (at least in princi­
ple) of the state, but it does not mean that the spirit of the seigneurial
was extinguished and in essence the beginning of the separation of
the oligarchy in Chile has always been its foundation in the image of
its enemy, which was like its father—namely, Peru.148 Because along
with this kind of vertical solidarity that is the military rule of obedi­
ence, and as its base, there is an essential but xenophobic internal
sympathy, which also ensues from the decisive moment. Herein lies
the logic and legitimacy of Chilean racism (which is entirely ideo­
logical, that is, without further foundation than belief itself)-149There
is no doubt that the radical threat posed by the Araucanians put
Chile’s germinal existence into question; we do not tend to think well
of those who have wanted to kill us. It is the reasoning of all frontiers
with pre-statist Indians. If there is a progressive gradation consisting
of a condition of inorganicity with a capacity for aggression or threat,
organicity with a capacity for memory but without a state, and

146 Ibid., p. 94.

147‘The private and seigneurial style was imposed in the Indies’ (ibid.,
P- 26).
148 ‘Valdivia was a prom inent encomendero in Peru’ (ibid., p. 19).
149 A large majority of the Chilean population has the blood type O, which
indicates indigenous presence, that is, it is a mestizo population.
82 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

organicity capable of memory, of the reconstruction of an ideological

heritage and of a state policy, the Araucanians did more for a nascent
Chile than for themselves, and we might even say that they were inca­
pable of producing their own memory.150 This surely distinguishes
them in an important way from Katarism, which is also militarist, as
a movement within Tupaj Amarism. What has been called Chilean
democracy is founded on this: on an ancestral feeling of equality
among Spaniards. A disciplined equality was a military necessity. It
did not mean that they believed in universal equality. The persistence
of egalitarian features within an fundamental order, of a certain gen­
eral cohesion along with an unquestionably seigneurial ascendancy
of the state, then, constitutes the characteristic composition or syn­
thesis of this formation.
It is interesting to compare the results of the military and social
siege laid by the Indians in the three societies. In Chile, as we have
just seen, the violence of the Araucanian programme precipitates the
early establishment of the state. The state, in turn, is configured not
as a bureaucratic entity as was the case with colonial Peru but by the
army conceived as state substance, that is, not as corporate, private
or spontaneous violence but as a general coercive latency. As for
Peru, or at least that Peru of 1879, the triumph of a counterrevolu­
tionary ideology (viceroyalist, Hispanicist and anti-indigenous) and
a false and bureaucratic unification constitute the basic determining
factors. As we shall see, it would have been difficult for Peru as a soci­
ety to escape either of these conditions. There is no doubt, if we turn
once more to the Chilean model, that war must provoke either dis­
persion, if its object is something disperse, or vigorous and passion­
ate forms of pathetic unity, with an intensity in proportion to the
extension, universality and duration of the event. The challenge of
the war produces a response of solidarity or nationalization. For this
reason it can be said that Chile is born unified by the Arauco War;
the Other is something so powerful that it demands the production

150 For problems of historical memory, see the works of E. P. Thompson.

 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 83

of a self-identity. This is not merely a logic of carpe diem. Not to adapt

here was to perish.151
Our discussion of Peru must take other criteria into account. In
the first place, because Peru represents a paradigmatic case of mul­
tiple constitutive or originary moments (with the systematization of
space through agriculture and the moral-historical foundation of the
conquest)—Peru is a more pre-Hispanic country than most in Latin
America yet a more typically colonial country.152 Here, there was not
so much an enemy to be defeated as a whole world to administer;
the problem of power, from the beginning, lay in the radical impos­
sibility of controlling the very thing it possessed because it was not
a case of the conquest of one people by another but of the occupation
of the apex of a social pyramid.153 Even in our discussion of the
national question, we must, in all rigour, speak of a second Peru,
because the Inca and their predecessors were successful, at least to a
considerable extent, in the construction of something that can only
be called a precapitalist mode of national formation. That Peru, like
China, Egypt and so many other cases, testifies to the foolishness of
the idea that only capitalist formations can be considered national.154

151 Challenge and response, used in this sense of the induction of a constitu­
tive act, are Arnold Toynbees terms. However, Tamayo employs the same con­
cept in 1910: ‘Is a rich and fertile environm ent better for man, for a race?
Perhaps not, because the ease of such an existence would hardly stimulate and
develop mans (or a races) activity and strength. A hard and barren environ­
ment would then be preferable, because then man would be forced to exert
himself, and his greater effort would impel his historical progress’ (Creadon
de la pedagogía nacional, chap . 53).
152 Murra, Formaciones económicas y politicos; Emilio Choy Ma, Antropología
e historia (Anthropology and History) (Lima: UNMSM, 1979).
153 See note 140.
154 This is Stalin’s concept: ‘A nation is not merely a historical category
but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising
capitalism’ (Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question: Selected
Writings and Speeches [New York: International Publishers, 1942].)
84 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

We are speaking, then, of the second nationalization of Peru. But we

must consider the cultural effects of bureaucratic organization. For
the Spaniards, administering Mexico or Peru meant administering
something immense—all of America. If the Chilean national ideol­
ogy is that which is born of the abyss of Arauco, Peru’s, at least in its
traditionally dominant stratum, is that of viceregalism.155 On the
other hand, if it is true that war is a unifying event, so is the institu­
tion of a bureaucratic order, in another way and to a different degree.
Bureaucracy generates a kind of unification from above that while
certainly inconsistent can generate new customs, affinities and artic­
ulations. Received habit can be translated into material forms in a
society; the subjective exercise of power is capable of producing
objective consequences that then cease to be entirely dependent upon
it.156 Here we must take into account that there are different forms
or degrees of unification. Peru, as the name of this bureaucratic or
aristocratic form of unity, does not constitute a deep nation,157 as it
would if it referred to the historical consequences of Andean agri­
culture, that is, to its modification oriented towards the present.
There is an important difference between the unity that comes from
a fundamental experience of war and that which comes from a

155 ‘Peru today is a coastal formation (José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos
de interpretación de la realidad peruana [Lima: Amauta, 1975(1928)], p. 205;
available in English as: Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality
[Marjory Urquidi trans.] [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971]).
156 The transform ation of the spirit of the state into social potentiality is an
unduly neglected aspect of most analyses of the so-called Hegelian-M arxist
theories of the state (see David Gold, Clarence Y. H. Lo and Erik Olin Wright,
‘Recientes desarrollos en la teoría marxista del Estado capitalista in Heinz
Rudolf Sonntag and Héctor Vallecilos [eds], El Estado en el capitalismo con­
temporáneo [Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977], pp. 23-61).
157 It is indeed still to be seen whether the Peruvian axis of nationalization
will be Lima and its ideology, which is viceregalism, or a contingent democratic
interpellation with an necessarily indigenous connotation. ‘Peru,’ Mariátegui
wrote, ‘must choose either the gamonal or the Indian (Siete ensayos, p. 194).
 ¡

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 85

vertical bureaucratic act, which, moreover, is extrinsic in this case.

This form of interpellation obviously cannot compete in terms of
penetration and density with the unification proper to the general
capitalist market that unquestionably produces superior forms of
intersubjectivity. Peru thus encountered a set of adverse conditions.
Given that Andean agriculture could not exist except in an organized
manner, with all the consequences that this entails, it had to set up a
power structure that could not but enter into a contract with regard
to the surplus generated prior to it. Further, given that the pyramid
of the state (that of the Incas) was compact, to occupy its apex
meant at once to adhere to its methods, even if practised in a degen­
erate way.158 This could not lead to a military logic but only to an
administrative or bureaucratic logic—and this is what happened.
Perricholismo159 was really the creole version of the bureaucratie-
seigneurial system, which produced a thinking in terms of capital
and not of territory, of tribute and not of cohesion, of status and not
of identity. Peru had more noblemen than any other Latin American
country but this was in no way to its benefit.160
We can therefore maintain that Peru was a nation and that it
ceased to be one in a kind of social recomposition that is surely not
unique in history. The system of ecological tiers161 or the spatial orga­
nization was translated into a juridico-political system that has had
considerable success in the conscious task of homogenization, at least
to the extent that this was possible in a context of non-market
exchange. We can also reasonably contend that the collapse of this

158 The mita, for example, was used in mining—a non-capitalist form was
carried over to a commercial form of exploitation. Yanaconaje was the recu­
peration of a pre-existing form, etc.
159 This is what the creole was called in its courtier version. From perra
[whore (literally, bitch)] and chola [half-breed; educated or assimilated Indian
woman]: the Peruvian lover of a viceroy, Amat, was called Perricholi.
160 Basadre, cited in Yepes del Castillo, Perú 1820-1920, p. 38.
161 Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas.

.
86 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

system, added to the demographic catastrophe and the colonial reor­

ganization of this world, necessarily instilled a general state of shock
or vacancy. Bureaucratic unification was but an attempt to escape
this situation of general provisionality by the juridico-formal route.162
The most radical and organic attempt to restore the old Andean logic
of space and to reconstruct that society within the new parameters,
now under a democratic principle of interpellation, was the cam­
paign led by Tupaj Amaru. His failure represents the failure of the
democratic constitution of the Peruvian nation.
The first thing that strikes us when we consider Amarus rebel­
lion, or even the series of Indian rebellions known by this name, is
the brevity of its duration, which in no way diminishes its enormous
social intensity. We could say that everything began in Chayanta in
July 1780 and ended, little more than a year later, with the siege of
La Paz in October 1781.163The rebellion of Condorcanqui itself was
even briefer: it broke out in Cuzco on 4 November 1780 and ended
on 5 April the following year, when Amaru was defeated.164 Now, is
the Hispanophilia displayed, if not by Peruvian society, at least by its
core at the time of the War of Independence, and then certainly by a
vital part of its subsequent ideological contents, not disconcerting
for a country with such a rich historical and cultural presence of the

162 Oscar Cornblit, ‘Levantamientos de masas en Perú y Bolivia durante el

siglo dieciocho* in Tulio Halperín Donghi (ed.), El ocaso del orden colonial en
Hispanoamérica (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1978), pp. 57-117.
163 In reality it was a series of rebellions. The first in the series took place in
Chayanta with Tomás Catari in July of 1780 (not to be confused with Tupac
Katari [Julián Apaza], although it is revealing that one caudillo takes the name
of the other, as occurred with the Willkas, as though to signify the perpetuity
of leadership and the circumstantiality of its support). The Chayanta rebellion
ended in the siege of La Plata (Chuquisaca) in February of 1781. La Paz was
besieged for less than eight months, between March and October of 1781.
164 Condorcanqui was executed in Cuzco on 18 May 1781; the siege of La
Paz would last for another five m onths after his death.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 87

Indians? Peru, surely, is not merely a semantic excess.165Amaru, then,

must be designated as the new underdeterminative point of rupture.
It is a moment of transformation of the ideological discourse of the
society. We could say that after Tupaj Amaru, nothing in Peru
remains as it was before.166
We must ask why so brief an event had such vast repercussions.
Today no one remembers dozens of viceroys and jurists but Amaru
and Katari are present, especially in the unconscious of these soci­
eties. The depth of the programme proposed by the political genius
of Condorcanqui [Amaru] resides in a way in its eclecticism, because
it was a programme for all of society. This was determined by his own
personal context. It is debatable whether Amaru was a descendent
of the Inca but there is no doubt that he belonged to a certain
hierarchy in the Incan aristocracy, which indicates that his relation
to colonial society was one of belonging and not of exclusion.167

165 This expression, more felicitous as such than as a concept, belongs to the
historian Pablo Macera.
166 There is a subtle shift even within the seigneurial articulation itself.
Its axis becomes strictly Hispanic. Previously, ‘if an Indian was of noble caste
( . . . ) then his nobility was as valid as a Spaniards and he neither paid tribute
nor was required to fulfil the duties of the mita, and was eligible to occupy
adm inistrative and military positions’ (Jan Szeminski, ‘La insurrección de
Tupac Am aru II: ¿Guerra de independencia o revolución?’, Estudios Lati­
noamericanos 2 [1974]: 9-40). After Amaru, an organized annihilation of the
traditions of the Inca state and a forced hispanicization were carried out, and
the creoles understood that without the support of the Spaniards they were
in no condition to maintain their situation. [ . . . ] Above all, they had to trans­
form their culture and renounce all family, cultural, and other ties with indige­
nous society’ (ibid.). Finally, there was even an attempt to eliminate the
Quechua language in what was like an inversion of Apaza’s programme which
had prohibited the use of Spanish. This is [José Antonio de] Areche’s ideolog­
ical legacy.
167 John H. Rowe speaks of ‘the tradition of using the indigenous nobility
for the execution of administrative orders’ (‘El movimiento nacional inca del
siglo XVIII’ in Alberto Flores Galindo (ed.), Sociedad colonial y sublevaciones
$$ • RENE Z AVALETA MERCADO

'Making one body of Indians and creole Spaniards, doing away with
the Europeans, who were to be killed making no distinction of per­
sons, class or age, because the government had to be wholly sloughed
oft?168 It is now clear beyond all doubt that Amaru was referring to
the entire people and not only to the Indians: ‘Documents from the
time of the campaign reveal that José Gabriel Amaru expected the
support of powerful groups in Cuzco.’169 This, then, was an Incan
interpellation of the whole society, a call for unification within cer­
tain models of legitimacy and not outside of them. In a way, this is
akin to Bolivars programme and that of the great majority of those
who fought after independence, but inverted, because here the inter-
pellative nucleus was constituted by the indigenous.
With Amaru, on the other hand, there is a political articulation
of the Andean spatial system, now embodied in the consequences of
the Potosí market. As the owner of a transport company that served
that market, this space was Amaru’s only possible frame of reference.
In reality the uprising was centred on the Potosí region; it could be
said that where this region ended, the influence of [José Antonio de]
Areche, that is, of Lima, began. This also explains the fact that the
abolition of the m ita and the right of Indians to occupy government
posts, indeed the emancipation of black slaves, figure among the first
points of his programme.170

populares: Tupac Am aru II, 1780 [Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1976], pp. 11-66;
here, p. 15). It is true, moreover, that Condorcanqui filed a legal claim that
took four years for his direct descent from the Inca lineage to be recognized.
He would not have sought such recognition within the Spanish juridical sys­
tem had he already had the intention of abolishing it.
168 Dám aso Katari, one o f the leaders of the Chayanta rebellion (Boleslao
Lewin, La rebelión de Tupac Am aru [Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1943], p. 282).
169 ‘But at the same time the m ovement became too powerful for the middle
and upper classes, which up until then had been their potential allies’ (Corn-
blit, ‘Levantamientos de masas en Perú y Bolivia, pp. 112-13).
170 The points o f the program m e were: (1) the appointm ent of Indians
to adm inistrative positions; (2) the right to travel to Spain w ithout prior
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS # 89

In our view, the subsequent course of events must be explained

by programmatic contradictions within the general movement. We
can indeed distinguish two wings or tendencies within it. The first
is what we might call the peasant or universal branch for the whole
of the colonial society (an Incan programme for all of Peru), which
is that represented by Condorcanqui himself but also by the
Rodriguez brothers and even the first Katari, Tomás.171 The other is
the millenarian, militarist and ethnocentric wing, which is directly
and rather violently epitomized in the figure of Julián Apaza. And
we of course cannot ignore the existence of a sector integrated into
colonial society and deeply invested in the status quo, the indigenous
reaction constituted by Pumacahua and the 12 ayllus of Cusco.172
There is, then, a conflict between a general democratic programme,
although with an indigenous connotation as its interpellative
nucleus, and a radical messianic proposition that swiftly mobilizes
armed support.
The military action, as is well known, was concentrated in
Apazas area. Its culmination was the blockade, the constant general
siege, of La Paz and Sorata. In La Paz alone, which was then a modest
town, 6,000 people died.173 A number of remarks of a more properly
military nature could be made on the subject, for example, on the

permission from the local authorities; (3) access to ecclesiastic ranks; (4) more
education for the Indians; (5) the abolition of the Potosí mita; (6) the abolition
of the reparto de efectos [forced distribution of goods] (Rowe, ‘El movimiento
nacional inca del siglo XVI11’, p. 35). O f these points, at least the first four are
oriented towards the integration of the Indians within the system, that is, its
democratization and not its abolition. As for the last two, the abolition of the
mita implied a defence of the community because the mita had produced the
forasteros. The sixth point refers to the resistance to forced commercialization.
171 The leaders of the rebellion in O ruro were Spaniards (the Rodriguez
brothers), and Tomás Katari had named a Spaniard governor of Tupiza.
172 Indigenous aristocrats such as Pum acahua and Coquehuanca fought
against Amaru (Cornblit, ‘Levantamientos de masas en Perú y Bolivia).
173 According to Segurólas diary written during the siege (ibid.).
90 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

transformation of social quantity into military quality, but the impor­

tant thing is its repercussions. As an act of re-foundation, there is no
doubt that the rebellion would not have had the same meaning if the
movement had not been split between Apaza’s ultimatism and
Amarus doctrine. In contrast to what happened in Peru, in Charcas
the movement had a global scope that can be ascribed to the fact that
it is within the sphere of Potosí, that is, it was the extension, in the
form of insurgency or war, of the immense depeasantization process
of Potosí. It is also here that a certain temperament, which is that of
the masses in action, is founded. The ferocity of Apazas proclamation
contained its own impracticability, but impossible movements often
found enduring schools. If the idea of mass accumulation is so cru­
cial in Bolivian history it is because it is inspired in this kind of ini­
tiation. After all, the logic of the siege of La Paz resembles that of
Willka in the Federal War.174 Apaza educated the masses in a kind of
democracy of the multitude, a self-determination and irreverence
that would be repeated later in the Fifteen Years War,175 with
[Manuel Isidoro] Belzu,176 and at all their critical moments. The agi­
tated character of the masses would besiege the state, which could
not in its routine existence be anything but this, a state under siege.
This is the importance of this moment in the formation of Bolivian
civil society.
To found a discourse of contestation or an ideology of insubor­
dination, whatever its merits, is not the same thing as to propose a
programme of social reform. Katari ordered the tongues of those
who spoke Spanish in his presence cut out and he is said to have
banned bread because it was not Andean, but Amarus actions were
far more terrifying because they constituted a concrete project for
the abolition of the seigneurial system in the form in which it existed.

174 See Chapter 2 in this volume.

175 José Santos Vargas, Diario de un comandante de la independencia ameri­
cana (1814-1825) (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1982).
176 Rigoberto Paredes, Melgarejo y su tiempo.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 91

What is significant in this interpellation is its subject.177178Amaru’s was

not the only egalitarian project in the history of Peru but an egali­
tarian project in which the call had as its core the Indian, the only
project that called for a nationalization founded on a deep-rooted
idea of Peru and not merely on a process of homogenization. Such
an egalitarian process, that is, the general constitution of a market of
free men, however, must also take into account the form in which it
is instituted. To be the recipient of freedom as a concession is not the
same thing as to conquer one’s own freedom. The in terp ellate core
of the process of nationalization in turn leaves its mark. Here Amaru
proposed that equalization be produced under the interpellation of
the indigenous, but as a convocation urbi et orbeythat is, for all men.
Hence the radical character of the Hispanocentric reaction, which
was like a reformulation of the Peruvian identity.
A number of conclusions can be drawn from this: that what is
decisive militarily is not always effective at the level of the state
(Katari); that the differed consequences of the failure of a military
project in the constitution of a state can nonetheless be organized or
absorbed in the form of habits of equality and self-determination;
and finally, that a universalist project, as a result of its very feasibility
as a national programme, produces an antithesis at least as powerful
as the project itself—but in inverted form. This is what happened in
Peru during the War of Independence 30 or 40 years after Amaru.
Peru became a bastion of loyalty to Spain.176 These were the decades
of forced de-Quechuizaiton, of the foundation of ideological
Hispanophilia, and surely that San Martin encountered ‘the curious
spectacle of the formation of a government for an independent Peru,

177 In the Althusserian sense: ‘All ideology hails or interpellates concrete indi­
viduals as concrete subjects’ and “transform s’ individuals into subjects (it
transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called inter­
pellation or hailing’ (Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’,
P- 173).
178 Szeminski, ‘La insurrección de Tupac Amaru II’.
92 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

made up of the same elements that had governed under Spanish

rule’179 should come as no surprise. Neither events like those of Torre
Tagle’s presidency nor the extensive enlistment of Peruvians in the
royalist armies can be seen as fortuitous or imposed by violence
alone.180 Peru’s relation to the Spanish question was quite different
from Venezuela’s or Mexico’s, or even El Plata’s. The war, therefore,
at least in this context, became largely a confrontation between
Charcas and Lima, crystalizing the bifurcation that had become
inevitable after the failure of Amaru.181 Lima would have been vice­
regal but not viceroyalist as it in fact came to be, nor would
Hispanophilia have become a kind of official religion, nor could one
ever have spoken of the ‘Indian stain’ [mancha india] had Amaru
succeeded in carrying through to the end his rare capacity to convoke
a national-popular bloc.
This is what we might call the floating form of ideology. The old
junker path was possible in Germany because Miinzer’s path had
failed. There is a moment of organic uncertainty in which the prac­
tice of historical selection defines things for a long time to come and
it was clear that here society had to reconstruct itself in Areche’s

179 Rowe, ‘El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIIf, p. 53.
180 Bolívar himself, who had said that ‘these Peruvians are the most miserable
m en for w ar’ (21 December 1825) and that he would not mince words on
Lima—‘Crim inal Babylon, ‘they see us as the usurpers of Peru’, ‘a country
cursed with a moral plague’—would nonetheless admit of the Indian soldiers
of the Spanish forces: ‘The excellence of the Spanish army in Peru in marching
w ithout losing strength. The loyalist soldiers walk fifteen or twenty leagues a
day, and they carry their food in a little coca pouch and in another of barley
or cooked or toasted maize (10 February 1824).
181 The m yths about the border have always been very crude. Mitre, for
example, believed that Argentina extended up to where a certain kind o f man
resided. This was not so. The separatist movements in Salta or the Confeder­
ation are not born o f presumed racial identities nor, of course, of Santa Cruzs
head. The sphere o f the m arket that had been centred on Potosí made things
seem to be in their natural place.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS * 93

image and that it wanted to eradicate everything that recalled Tupaj

Amaru. It is the history of every ruling class that has been threatened
but not destroyed. Where there is a more or less serious crisis (and
that of Amaru was extremely serious), the privileged classes have a
greater awareness of what can be lost.182 In other words, the provo­
cation or explicit resolve to change things is felt here in an almost
material way and produces a reactionary class consciousness. One
who has gained something is less conscious of what one has than is
one who has been on the verge of losing everything. Therefore, if
Katari was fiercer, more extreme and more terrible than Amaru, the
latter embodied a project for all, a utopia that was not merely
utopian. The elite saw in it a society that could exist, a kind of
national independence that it did not accept even with Bolivar, who
represented an enlightened seigneurial project, although of course
with a broader total perspective. This is, roughly, the Peru that would
come to face Chile in 1879.
Of course it would be a Peru even more corrupted by the bac­
chanal of the guano boom (Bolivar had said: ‘Peru [ . . . is marked by
two elements that are inimical to any just and liberal regime:] gold
and slaves’),183 which would only exacerbate the scorn of the vice­
royalists, and less unified, because with independence the state had
lost the centripetal tendencies of the bureaucratic structure that it
had under Spanish rule.

182 A culture of fear of the Indians emerged after Amaru but this fear had
existed previously: ‘It had been revealed [to a priest] under the seal of confes­
sion that the plan was to attack the Palace and take out the guards at midnight,
take the armoury and kill Your Majesty’s ministers and principal persons and
rise with the city, as the capital of the kingdom; the Indian conspirators
demanded the restoration of an ancient empire (Report to the viceroy Manso
de Velasco, cited in Rowe, ‘El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII’ p. 50).
183 But this was not, as we have seen, the only thing he said about
Peru. [Simon Bolívar, El Libertador. Writings of Simon Bolivar (Frederick H.
Fornoff trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 27. In Zavaleta’s
manuscript, Bolivar’s famous phrase is condensed to ‘Peru, gold and slaves.’]
O* • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

Centralism, or a bureaucratic identity, was for Peru what Potosí

was for Charcas in that in each case there was a false unification or
unfinished tendency towards an apparent articulation: in the orga­
nization of Potosí, the first internal market of what is now Bolivia
and the surrounding region, because it disappeared along with its
perishable wealth or a market linked not to the social substance that
results from continuous exchange but to a contingent material fact;
in the Lima system, because the force of the state cannot go beyond
the limits of its enforceability and here the bureaucratic form was
based not on an intrinsic authority but on external backing from
Spain. The mercury crisis had the same divisive effect for Bolivia as
independence for Peru.184 In Bolivia, because the internal market was
dependent on an ephemeral product and, on the other hand, because
it had to restrict itself to the sphere of depeasantization or of what
we are designating as such for the purposes of this study.185 That is
to say, it was dependent on largely fortuitous factors with no capacity
for cohesion once the axis or primary cause was destroyed. In Peru,
this led to what some have called the gamonal form of the state.186 In
other words, for somewhat different reasons, both countries not only
were frustrated in their attempts to constitute themselves as nations

184 Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra: Formación de una élite diri­
gente en la Argentina criolla (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1972), p. 79.
185 Although it was extensive. We will return to this in the following chapters,
especially in reference to the formation of the working class. In our view, the
strong mitima roots of the pre-Columbian population, the forasteros of
Amarus time, the ccajchas and obrajes played a major part in the construction
of the tenets of the proletariat.
186 ‘Gamonalism, within the central and unitary republic, is the ally and agent
of the capital in the regions and provinces (Mariátegui, Siete ensayos, p. 202).
Indeed, it would be absurd to reduce the role of gamonalism to one of frag­
mentation. It was a backward kind of mediation and the gamonal, in a way,
was a mediator and functionary of the state. In reality, gamonalism as such
was an extra-economic form of extraction of a surplus. Alberto Flores Galindo
suggests that we might speak, as Fontana did, of an aggregate of isolated rural
cells’.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 95

in the modern sense but also regressed with respect to their previous
condition. ‘The new independent state was incapable of imposing its
hegemony at the level of the entire territory called Peru.’187
Gamonal mediation, like any other mediation, has no intrinsic
value. It is the same as the corporation or the union, which can suc­
cessively become apparatuses of the state, organs of mediation or
counterhegemonic structures.188 Mutatis mutandis, the traditional
figure of the gamonal might have been a divisive element in Peru—
in fact, it had not only fostered anarchy but was also the backward
form of centrality of an extremely weak social equation. Once Limas
centrality—based on the colonial pact—was broken, the Peruvian
provinces acquired conditions of increased contact with the emerging
world market compared to the scattered Bolivian provinces, which
had no such contact at all. In a process that bears some resemblance
to that of Central America, each region could communicate auto­
nomously with the world and only inefficiently with its own
presumed centre.189 Given the ancestral weakness of the state in
Charcas,190 if the same condition of autonomous geographic access
had existed, perhaps the country itself would have fallen apart. In a
way, the habits of bureaucratic centralization, to which must be
added the further effect of the surplus, saved the unity of Peru
through hereditary rule. But the gamonal component had to be
added to the bureaucratic and seigneurial lustre of the general ide­
ology, while in Bolivia the long stalemate between caudillism and the
masses in action permitted only a feeble reconstruction of the

187 Alberto Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino: Ensayo de historia

regional (siglos XVII-XX) (Lima: Horizonte, 1977), p. 46.
188 Against Althusser, for whom all mediation is also a state apparatus.
189 Ernesto Yepes del Castillo, ‘Burguesía y gamonalismo en el Perú’, Análisis.
Cuadernos de Investigación (Lima) 7 (1979): 31-66.
190 Gabriel René Moreno, La Audiencia de Charcas (The Audience of
Charcas) (La Paz: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 1970).
96 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

seigneurial, which had nearly lost its will to live.191 In any case, the
shift from a centralized power structure to a country of gamonales
revealed the emergence of the centrifugal form that the state contract
had assumed in Peru—a bankrupt form, utterly impotent before the
challenges it faced. If this did not happen in Bolivia it is because the
gamonales were themselves weak in their own impoverished and
autarkic regions, reduced to mere subsistence, with no capacity for
connection to the world. The society itself, moreover, had gotten
used to living in its traditional stalemate. It is the Peruvian gamonal
form that explains the disunity expressed in the country’s three gov­
ernments at the time of the war (because, in contrast to Chile, which
had adopted forms of rational legitimation in the constitution of
power with Portales, here there were no such forms at all), its non­
transformation into a national war except when the fighting had
reached the very heart of the country, even the flight of its president
in at the height of the conflict.192 By this we mean only to say that if
Peru and Bolivia had had something even remotely comparable to
Chiles social optimum, that is, a fluid relation between the state and
society, they would have prevailed on Peruvian territory, even if Chile
had a certain superiority in terms of its gross product.193 To cite a

191 Adolfo Ballivián, in his style and person, is an example of a kind of deca­
dence that overtook the traditional aristocracy in Bolivia. José María Linares
is really no less representative of this.
192 Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, v o l . 8; Heraclio Bonilla, Un
siglo a la deriva: Ensayos sobre el Perú, Bolivia y la guerra (Lima: Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, 1980).
193 Economic arguments about military matters are one thing; military
arguments about the economy, another. The Chilean ‘military investment
was superior in tactical and strategic terms. This was well thought out by the
political leadership. Still, the merit of this campaign lay in its low cost relative
to the scale of its success. To achieve this, in conditions of any degree of nor­
mality or equilibrium, an overwhelming economic superiority would be
required. It was the existence or semi-existence at the level of the state of the
Peruvian and Bolivian societies that made the war into a kind of target practice.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURPLUS • 97

recent example, it is obvious that the Vietnamese in the context of

their war had an optimum superior to that of the United States in
that space and in that situation.
Interpretations that attribute the defeat to a servility posited as
the predominant mode of existence of the Peruvian-Bolivian popu­
lation, which has a veiled social-Darwinist connotation,194 are of little
use. Ultimately, the Chileans were no more ‘free-born Englishmen’195
and in the last instance the Weltanschauung of its ruling class was as
seigneurial and oligarchic as that of its enemies. In reality, a servant
and even a slave can be a great soldier—but to be a great soldier, one
must believe in servitude or in slavery, that is, there must be a relation
of consent. Genghis Khans men reached the heart of the West and
not because his men were free, at least not strictly speaking.
Such is the Peru that was defeated by Chile in 1879. In the fol­
lowing chapter, we will speak more specifically of the Bolivian for­
mation. In any case, it is with Amaru and not with Santa Cruz that
the idea of Gran Peru196 is dissolved. The rebellion or mobilization
in effect spans the entire trade circuit that had been built between
Lima, Potosí and Buenos Aires,197 that is, the Potosi-Amarist well-
spring was the last chance for the consolidation of the traditional
space of the region. Santa Cruz himself later represented no more
than an inter-seigneurial proposition, although conserving a certain
sense of the traditional territory. The loss of Atacama and the Peru­
vian provinces was only an extension of that first dislocation.
What matters in the conflict, in its conclusion, is that Chile was
able to set tasks equal to its ends while Peru and Bolivia were not.
This is what we have been calling the level of the social optimum.

194 See Chapter 3 in this volume.

195 See Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy’.
196 Oscar Cornblit, ‘Levantamientos de masas en Perú y Bolivia.
197 Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino, p. 17.
 CHAPTER TWO

The World of the Fearsome Willka

In the absolute confusion or unease produced by the multiplication

of objects in the world, men are alone in the midst of things which
are increasing endlessly. Is this not now the solitude of the age, the
general fallacy of its identity and, in short, what we might call the
second loss of the self?
The era is multitudinous and it is as if it were fleeing from us, as
if it always signified something other than itself, lost in the enormous
number of its invisible events. Nonetheless, despite continually over­
whelming us, it has a weak flank amid this sort of infinite siege and
this consists in that it can be known. There is no doubt something
astonishing in the fact that the very moment of the explosion of the
worlds quantity is at once that in which it can be known for the first
time. This should lead us already to the distinction between cogniz­
able and incognizable eras, and even between internally cognizable
eras and eras that can only be known from the outside or after they
have passed. The advent of abstract labour, which serves as the raison
d'être of our temporality or horizon, ultimately could not but cause
certain instances of social quantification and, in this general sense,
quantification necessarily contains the assumption of iterability, that
is, Bacons method.
Yet if the quantification of the social remains a promise not
wholly fulfilled, on the other hand, abstract labour, or the social sub­
stance or substrate, does not. This is something palpable, easily ver­
ifiable. The wish to bring Bacon to bear on the problems of society
constitutes a desire for certainty that is proper to men who live in
uncertainty. This has no doubt led to a closed preserve which is the
positivist closure of the social sciences. We must operate with some
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 99

certainties or at least attempt to construct them. In this respect it is

strange that the certainties available to us are but certain aspects of
that which is particular in the world, of what we grasp in its pulver­
ization (because multiplication is also a form of atomization), that
is, a knowledge by reduction, and, on the other hand, the second cer­
tainty arises which is the almost spontaneous, automatic, inevitable
certainty of totality. Totalization is not something that has occurred
in any prior age.
It seems to us that there are three crucial moments in Marx’s
thought, which are undoubtedly linked. In the first place, reductive
certainty, understood as the originary or essential mode of relation
of men to matter, is undoubtedly a process ‘in which production is
the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment*.1
In fact, if the primary event is the encounter between individuals and
nature, then what is called a mode of production is already a [deter­
minate] mode of expressing their life, a determinate mode of life, so
that ‘what they are, therefore, coincides with their production; both
with what they produce and with how they produce’.2 This, then, is a
kind of fundamental identity, and if the most ancient form of trans­
formation of nature is agriculture, this is why we say that a society is
what its agriculture is. And it is here, in the mode of production
understood in its strict sense, that is, the elemental relation to the pro­
ductivity of the land, where we can see the extent to which Bolivian
society, for example, still belongs to its constitutive moment. This
means, in short, that there was never anything at the level of social
distribution or of the superstructure that would affect this kind of
inertia of the base.
The methodological strategy of sacrifice, the reduction of the
phenomenon to the construction of a thought-concrete, therefore

1 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

(Martin Nicolaus trans.) (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 94.
2 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The German Ideology, part 1 (New York:
International Publishers, 1970), p. 42.
100 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

had to occur; self-knowledge could not be produced without a

moment of dissolution or separation, that is, of sacrifice. What is rad­
ical in Marx, however, does not consist in his deliberation as to the
transformation of the world; rather, after the incorporation of a dif­
ferent perspective on the question of historical time, the knowledge
that the world would transform itself became inevitable, and is
Copernican in that it is a discovery of something that exists.
The substantive idea is undoubtedly the rupture with traditional
temporality, that is, the seasonal idea of time, which includes prehis­
toric hunter-gatherers—man without conscious memory—as well as
historical or agricultural man. In reality, in a qualitative sense, it is a
question of the abolition of agriculture. Therefore, in what is like the
prodrome of expanded reproduction, it is as if man suddenly began
to live several lives within the physical-temporal space where he had
always lived a single life. It is, in short, a concentration of time. This
consists in a set of basic life events, from the extension of the human
lifespan to real subsumption, from the subjugation of disease, as a
negation of life, to the alteration of the female reproductive cycle, not
to mention the spatial effects of concentration, that is, the industrial,
urban and national ethos, to the new time of politics, that is, the
emergence of the total form of social change, which is the contem­
porary phenomenon of revolution. This is a sequence whose
moments are mutually contained. If real subsumption, for example,
as such, must be a mass phenomenon, is it not true that it must there­
fore contain an anthropocentric element? Consequently, the notion
of the self or of the modern individual, of the self-determination of
the human, of the force of the masses as the application of ancestral
experience to productive as well as historical effectivity, of the con­
scious exercise of human agency, which is therefore a logic of the
multitude, all of this necessarily generates forms of intersubjectivity
or totalization (here the second proposition has constructed the
third) that, if they are strengthened by their self-knowledge, are con­
summated in a term inus that is conventionally called socialism,
which in this case can indeed be considered scientific.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 101

The concentration of time itself works towards collective knowl­

edge as a mass force in the sense that there is a qualitatively different
effect that makes accumulated or condensed time behave with a kind
of infused certainty in a way that would not have been possible if the
same time were conceived over a longer period. This tells us, there­
fore, that the distinction between cognizable and incognizable or
unrepresentable eras is far from an arbitrary one. The acquisition of
the concept of abstract labour as a measure of society is therefore an
event in itself, and an event that is collectively produced. Let us leave
aside the question of whether here a calculability of the social is in
fact inaugurated, although there is no doubt that the introduction of
accounting within domestic production must be its germ. In any
case, what matters here is the emergence of what has been called the
social substance or social matter, or at least its concrete revelation.
Certainly, as the notes on Wagner indicate, in any age concrete labour
could in theory be aggregated to obtain a kind of value, that is, a kind
of socially necessary labour. But that, even if we grant that it is pos­
sible, could only have something like a statistical existence without
any social effect. Here, however, the result, social matter or value, is
something that acts upon its causes; without the method of sacrifice
it simply would not have been possible to obtain the ‘mode of life
with which we take part in the transformation of nature in the form
it assumes in our times; this now leads us to ascertain the existence
of a new actor, which is a concrete totality or intersubjectivity.
In other words: value as ‘something that exists in all forms of
society’ is therefore composed of imaginary labour in that we must
consider incommensurable forms of labour and different kinds of
men, with no concrete traces of interaction, that is, labour irreducible
to a common term. Here, however, abstract labour in its present form
must constitute, at least in principle, a form of labour that somehow
contains a whole other form of labour in the sphere of the measur­
able. It is, then, an interaction on the basis of an equivalent measure
that is determined by the postulation of free man as the element or
unit of the social.
102 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

The construction of the thought-concrete that is totality or at

least social totality is only the continuation of this no doubt
formidable point of departure that is the state of separation3 or what
we might call the interchangeable solitude of capitalist man. This
solitude is indeed necessary, and implies a loss of the old identity or
self submerged in the small community, so that the new intersubjec­
tivity, which contains the form of totalization proper to this produc­
tive age, can be constructed. The production of this social substance
is what enables the reduction of social activity, following certain rup­
tures that can be considered epistemological, to its substantive
moment, which is value; but this could not exist as an effectively
social and living substance without its unconscious, the inevitable
result of so fundamental a totalization, which is the production of
discourse or of an organic ideology. Totalization cannot be thought
without the constitution of hegemony. The powerful logic of this
paradigm is what we might call Marx’s relevance for our time.
Totality, however, if it is not an idea that can designate an
unstructured sum, cannot in principle mean more than this—that
some partialities have had to do with the composition of others and
that there is no independence or isolation within this sociohistorical
formation. This can still serve as a correct description of what hap­
pens with the great events of the age (the nation, the class, the state)
without yet describing the distribution of the elements within this
totality; this is what [Karel] Kosik called an empty totality’: ‘False
totalization [and synthesis] show up in the method of the abstract
principle, which leaves aside the wealth of reality, i.e. its contradictory
character and its multiple meanings.’4
The danger of so comprehensive a construction as that of the
principle of totalization is that it tends to Find its own validation

3 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique ofPolitical Economy, VOL. 2 (David Fernbach

trans.) (London: Penguin, 1992).
4 Karel Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World
(Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt trans) (Boston: D. Riedel, 1976), p. 28.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 103

within itself, like in Hegel’s metaphor of spheres within spheres. The

problem really lies in deciding when we must refer to foundational
forms or ultimacy as the nature of the age and when the internal his­
tories or histories of a singular articulation, the ad hoc or simply
incommensurable aggregation of a social association or correlation,
without one thing becoming useless in relation to the other.
Formal subsumption, for example, contains the most central
point of originary accumulation, which is subordination, in that it
resolves the anxiety of alienation in a certain sense. This is why the
determination of the constitutive moment or interpellation is so rad­
ical, so vital, so singular, and not only with regard to the study of the
state. It is so decisive an event that it can be said that men live only
to formulate an interp ellate call or to answer it, or to live that which
has been received previously.
Powerful as they are, these categories, however, perhaps like all
categories, are slaves to their impossibilities or lacunae. We can speak
of a productive regime or of productive labour or of real subsump­
tion or even of a socioeconomic formation but each of these theo­
retical objects will have occurred in one way or another. Although
they contain a thought-concrete of general validity, they inevitably
have a history. A man, for example, is never wholly ‘alienated’ or
‘separated’. The formulation state of separation or receptivity here is
but a principle or, if you will, a petitio principii. Ultimately, the same
state of separation is produced within a tribe of barbarians whose
space has been seized by invaders as through afarmer-type accumu­
lation, which is the revolutionary one according to Marx. Likewise,
an inherited fortune in the hands of a usurer is, as inherited money,
the same material substance as the inherited money of the capitalist
before he turns it into productive capital: the difference is in the mind
of each, of the miser and of the industrialist. It is one thing for a free
man to be produced because he has been expelled by his master for
whatever reason and another for him to conquer his freedom
through his own will, against that of the master, although in both
SM • R ES'i ZAVALETA MERCADO

cases we obtain the same ‘free man. Finally, if by real subsumption

we understand only de facto subordination and the internalization
or somatization of discipline, we must concede that this can occur
through an authoritarian process (because history proves that it is
possible to transform ones dispossession into ones own idea of one­
self) or through a purely hegemonic process (although it is also true
that nothing has ever really occurred through a purely hegemonic
process).
If we accept the premise that the closest thing to practice itself
is the organized memory of practice, that is, if we agree that knowl­
edge is the archive of past practices, then the idea of the simultaneity
of totality must replace that of society as discrete spheres or a struc­
ture of structures and empirical, describable objects must at least
incorporate theoretical or sacrificed objects. This is why the idea of
a general, alocalist theory of the state proves so metaphysical; on the
contrary, we could say that a local aggregation, emerging from its
own causal chain or simply by chance, determines the form in which
these universal-reiterable conditions that affect the history of power
are fulfilled. These are the necessary supplements to a system of
thought that would otherwise have been closed off in the hermetic
universe of its great central ideas; without them, the concept of totality
would not be translatable into the concrete. There is no doubt a
healthy distance between the idea that ‘the history of humanity is the
history of class struggle or the tactical logic of class against class and
the blocco storico or the concepts of composite average and irradiation,
but it is no greater than the distance between Marx’s concepts of
mode of production as ideal average and his analyses of socio­
economic formations in motion, such as that of the Eighteenth
Brumaire.
Thus, the appropriation of the world follows the path of a kind
o f social analysis of history, to the extent, of course, that history does
not constitute its own solipsism. We can therefore speak only of a
history of the major elements of the era and not of a history of all
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 105

things. If we consider, again, the question of different paths, how can

we explain the fact that the American South did not follow a junker
path, while the Prussians did? Ultimately, the former was as
thoroughly precapitalist as the latter, or as the Meiji, and in all three
cases these societies found themselves faced with a fully developed
capitalist world. A definition of formal subsumption, then, even if
it includes the substitution of traditional temporality and the
emptying-interpellation continuum itself, is of little use to us because
we would have to determine in the first place who is doing the inter­
pellating and in the name of what world or history it interpellates or
why its call is answered, for where an interpellative process succeeds
it is reasonable to suppose that others have failed.
Things are of course very different if the productive mentality
comes from a kind of man like that which the English process
produced, where real subsumption—if we think of Stephenson or
Arkwright or so many others—was not just a task of the Enlighten­
ment but also an act or affair of the people. Here, therefore, anthro­
pocentrism is not just a doctrine of do-gooders but also a kind of
general impulse or predisposition, while if the interpellation takes
place under a parasitic form, for example, that of French usurious
capital or the various levels of seigneurialism of the different bour­
geois Spanish varieties, the process itself must orchestrate its own
reproduction. It is also true that the English have had to pay for the
precocious apparent perfection of their capitalist history.
These ideas will be useful as we attempt to describe the character
of the Bolivian socioeconomic formation of the last four decades of
the nineteenth century. In the previous chapter, we examined the
explosive encounter between three social formations and to some
extent their historical origins, especially those of Peru and Chile. It
is not enough, for example, to say that Bolivia was not capitalist then.
We would at least have to inquire into the substantive aspects in
which it was in fact precapitalist and those in which it was not, and,
if possible, where these different aspects come from. In any case,
106 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

from even a preliminary study, it was clear that universal categories

are of little use in understanding our subject. We came to a kind of
aporia because whatever their logico-formal importance (to use a
somewhat inadequate terminology) or even in the case of an effective
incorporation or thought-concrete, these categories tend towards
their own abolition by way of their qualification or contingency. It is
a fact that appropriation must always occur in a particular context,
even in the case of proven principles. If, as history has so often
shown, a heteroclitic interpellation becomes a kind of non-capitalist
mode of occurrence of capitalism, we should surely discuss the pos­
sible import of unconsciously bourgeois or democratic tasks within
movements of a non-capitalist configuration. It is here, where the
temptation to renounce a general analysis of particular phenomena
is so strong, that we discover the flexible richness of certain inter­
mediate notions or paradigms of inquiry such as the socioeconomic
formation or historical bloc.

A socioeconomic formation is generally defined as the articulation

of various modes of production. With good reason, this term itself—
articulation—has been disputed because it is certainly not simply an
accord between different elements but also the qualification of some
by others, in such a way that none of them maintains its prior form.
The concept is undoubtedly more complex. Paul Claudel wrote—
granted, in a spirit of jest—that France is a thought, that is, some­
thing difficult to define but present in synthetic form in almost every
man. It is like a complex self-evident fact that is more powerful in its
obviousness than the definitions that have been ascribed to it.
Let us turn, with this in mind, to a description of Bolivian society
in the nineteenth century:
The Bolivian panorama in the middle of the nineteenth cen­
tury is that of an essentially rural and agricultural society
(Dalence 1851, pp. 197-230). Of the total of 1,373,896
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 107

inhabitants counted in a census during that period without

counting the tribes of the Eastern plains, only a third lived
in towns and cities. The city of La Paz, the largest and most
prosperous commercial centre at the time, had a population
of only 42,000. [ . . . ] Some 20,000 people were employed in
artisanal production, including carpenters, stoneworkers,
glaziers, potters, and others (Fellman Velarde 1970:11.113).
The tradesmen dedicated to the satisfaction of the limited
demand of those centres resented the import economy.
Through their instinct of self-preservation, this group,
which consisted mostly of mestizos, would support the pro­
tectionist measures of the old regime. The artisans, because
of their long guild history and urban location and despite
their limited numbers, represented an easily mobilizable
strategic force in political revolts. [ . . . ] The country’s ruling
class was made up of creole landowners numbering approx­
imately 23,000, including their families. This class, with
some 5000 haciendas, owned 50 per cent of the best arable
lands and exercised seigneurial control over 160,000 farm
labourers (Dalence 1851: 234-7). This tiny group of hacen­
dados— 1 per cent of the total population—lived in the cities
whence they directed the political and economic life of the
nation. What is known as ‘Bolivian history’ of the nineteenth
century refers largely to the activities of this class. On the
opposite extreme were approximately half a million comu-
nario Indians—close to 35 per cent of the population—who
lived in more or less isolated pueblos occupying roughly 20
per cent of the arable land. Between these two poles were
relatively numerous intermediate groups of indigenous and
mestizo tenant farmers (360,000, including their families)
and smallholders (160,000, including their families).5

5 Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata, pp. 56-7. References in the passage are to:
José María Dalence, Bosquejo estadístico de Bolivia (Chuquisaca: Ymprenta
108 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

An analysis of this excellent summary by Antonio Mitre shows

that the basic conflict was between a tradesmen-comunario axis and
the landowners. If mining, which is the quintessential^ precapitalist
activity in that it precedes capitalism because it tends towards it, is
absent here, it is because of the chronic deficit of the trade balance
[that is, a virtual disappearance from the world market] and the
growing demonetization of the economy*—that is, the regression of
the embryonic domestic market that had been constituted around
Potosí. It is also clear that the class struggle emerges between the
countryside and the city or, rather, between the countryside allied
with a minority faction within the city and the city linked to a power
system rooted in the pueblos (which here means something very dif­
ferent from in Mexico, as is the case with the hacienda).
It is easy, however, to say of France that it is a thought. Here there
is an assumption of something that has been thought in common or
a thinking of France that has become that of all Frenchmen. Most
likely, it is a combination of the encyclopedists, Robespierre and
Napoleon. In any case, whether it is an ideological fact or not, nobody
doubts that this social body spans history from the Gauls to the post­
revolutionary Frenchmen, through slavery, feudalism and capitalism;
here the formation is defined by an identity that cuts across its devel­
opment, its articulation. On this very point, for example, Bolivian
views of Bolivia differ from one another: from [Ernesto] Sanabrias,
which is in reality [Gabriel René] Moreno’s—‘Bolivianness in the
sense of a society with its own characteristics, self-aware and capable
of attaining the formal position of a nation-state, whose origins are
more recent and begin with the organization of the colonial Spanish
province known as New Toledo or Upper Peru or, more properly,
Charcas*6—to that of the Bolivian massif7or Tamayo’s ideas, or those

de Sucre, 1851); José Fellman Velarde, Historia de Bolivia, tomo II: La Boli-
vianidad semifeudal (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1970).
6 Hernando Sanabria Fernández, ‘Preámbulo’ in Moreno, La Audiencia de
Charcas, p. 9.
7 Mendoza, El macizo boliviano.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 109

that can be culled from the works of Murra, Choy and Condarco. This
theory of the sterility of the non-Spanish inheritance is connected in
its more or less Darwinist sense to Arguedas’ theses, which, in essence,
are nothing but those of José Antonio de Areche. In any case, if Bolivia
is a thought, it is no doubt as a result of a certain prolonged coexis­
tence of contradictory conceptions of its own formation.
The problem here lies in determining to what point it is legiti­
mate to conduct a genetico-structural analysis of an existing forma­
tion; in other words, if it is true that the domestication of the potato,
for example, in the way that Marx speaks of those formations whose
base is constituted by communal property now dissolved, has some­
thing to do with Bolivia’s present. It must be said here not only that
the communal forms have not been dissolved by the (hypothetical)
nucleus of irradiation, but also that, even to the extent that this has
occurred, which is slight, they could not be dissolved without the
nucleus that irradiates or suppresses preserving a certain residue or
partial determination by the very thing that it irradiates or sup­
presses. Of course we cannot dismiss the problem posed by Sanabria,
which is the question of the plausibility of the juridical origins of the
formation, with the stroke of a pen. We could say that the organiza­
tion of the highest spheres of the juridico-political system in fact
comes from the Audiencia of Charcas, but this means only that it
was the superstructure of the Potosí market; the Potosí market in
turn was a particular form of mercantilization that surely had to
adapt to the principles of the primordial formation, which is that
which the Spaniards encountered at the time of conquest. If the point
of departure is defined in so voluntarist a way, that is, if it refers to
the current Bolivian nation-state, it could just as well be said that its
project is unfinished as that it began with independence as the
juridico-official moment of its existence. Its obvious that for the pur­
poses of a social history like that which we propose to write, ‘Bolivia’
itself is but a moment in a much longer progression.
110 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

It is Sereni who, unsurprisingly as an important theorist of

the national question, refers to the ‘socioeconomic formation as a
synthetic-totalizing formulation: ‘Generally used to designate not so
much the process of formation of society in general as that of a par­
ticular society or succession of societies, or, as it were, the final result
of this process’,8and, on the other hand, as a combination of different
levels of analyses: ‘This category expresses the unity [and we would
add, totality] of the different spheres—economic, social, political,
and cultural—of the life of a society; and it expresses it, moreover,
in the continuity and at the same time in the discontinuity of its his­
torical development.’9
What this notion says, therefore, is that not only can the social
world be understood as a totality, and a totality that can be known,
but also that the social substance that emanates from it (from total­
ization) can and in reality must be translated into the events, great
or small, but significant, that make up its internal history. In other
words, through a prescience à la Claudel, Mexico is Mexico, from the
despotic-tributary system to the colonial system, to that of the
Republic, that of Porfirism and that of the bourgeois revolution.
Moreover, there is no doubt that in Mexico there are at least two
modes of production and its character is determined, therefore, by
the pattern of articulation and irradiation. Industrialization, for
example, can take place without a process of intellectual reform
and in this case the conditions of the fundamental productive force
that is the worker will be similar to those of servitude or slavery: a
speaking tool. The same elements or modes of production, therefore,
can be co-inserted in one way or another, in one proportion or
another and with different degrees of irradiation. As a result of
the depth of the bourgeois revolution understood as intellectual
reform, French smallholding, for example, in no way implied a

8 Emilio Sereni, La categoría ‘formación económica y social’ (México City:

Roca, 1973), p. 59.
9 Ibid., p. 69.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 111

spiritual resistance to capitalism. Meanwhile, smallholding in Bolivia

or Peru was regarded as a true act of rebellion against the state
because it prevented its appropriation of the surplus.
Ultimately, even countries that are identical in terms of their mode
of production, in the collective form of transformation or appropri­
ation of nature (for example, Argentina, England and France), will
have wholly different logics in their symbolic or politico-liturgical
attributes, that is, in their superstructural effects and, above all, in
the constitution of the state. It goes without saying, of course, that
very different superstructures can nonetheless fulfil the same func­
tion enabling and guaranteeing reproduction, and this is why while
the ‘isolation of social relations from the relations of production
explains the new unity of the history of the world, an analysis of the
superstructural level and of the socioeconomic formation itself refers
to its qualitative diversity. In other words, if a law of correspondence
between base and superstructure exists, history itself is a struggle
between that law and the broken or oblique form of its fulfilment;
if the superstructure has a kind of temperament or idiosyncrasy in
its mode of relation to the base, all this is but part of the history of
the complex form of belonging that connects the mode of produc­
tion, as an isolation of the primary act, to its phenomenon or appari­
tion, which is the superstructure, and the emergence of a particular
totality, which is the socioeconomic formation.
*

Just as it is said that the Italians grafted commercial capital onto

Spain10 (although it could also be said that they grafted the impossi­
bilities of Italian commercial capital onto Spain), there is no doubt
that primitive forms of capitalism existed in Potosí from the begin­
ning. ‘The economic system is controlled by those who control the
means of circulation;11 from the beginning there is a predominance

10 Pierre Chaunu, La España de Carlos V (Barcelona: Peninsula, 1976).

11 Juan Carlos Garvaglia, Introduction to Carlos Sempat Assadourian et al.,
Modos de producción en América Latina, p. 8.
112 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

of commercial capital over productive capital which, moreover, is

capitalist only in an imperfect way (incomplete formal subsumption,
only a primitive form of real subsumption).
The necessary forms of alienation would inevitably be produced;
the production of free workers and even the forced introduction of
wages would ensue. This is a typical imperative form of construction
of free men.
The cuatequil or the system of forced wage labor that was to
develop on a much larger scale in Peru under the name of
mita [ . . . ] a system of compulsory wage labour [ . . . ] in
the end became the chief source of labour in the colony.12
And:
In Potosí 708 men entered the mines every day. They
worked for one week and had two weeks off [ . . . ]. They
were mingas for the most part, that is, free Indians who were
voluntarily employed, and mitayos, forced to work for a fixed
salary.13
But our task here, in the context of this history, is to define the
Bolivian socioeconomic formation first during the War of the Pacific,
which was like its day of judgement, but even more importantly,
at the mom ent of the general national crisis that was the Federal
Revolution. We can pose a number of questions, although they may
seem somewhat academic:
Why is it that Potosí, which supplied the conditions of possibility
for circulation and even the price revolution and the depreciation of
fixed rents, without which European capitalism would not have been

12 Silvio Zavala, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943), pp. 93-7. Cited in
A. G. Frank, Mexican Agriculture, 1521-1630: Transformation of the Mode of
Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 128.
13 Pedro Santos Martínez, Las industrias durante el Virreinato (1776-1810)
(Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1969), p. 117.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 113

possible (Potosí, in a Toynbeean sense, is therefore a Western phe­

nomenon), did not become capitalist itself?
Why did Spanish domination of agriculture not produce a
‘Spanish’ transformation of agriculture?
Why, in the silver mines themselves, if there was an owner of the
means of production and a buyer of labour power, did neither the
buyer nor the seller become capitalist, strictly speaking?
The facts tell us that even if we suppose that a formally capitalist
sector existed, there was never a formally capitalist environment. In
other words, what capitalist elements there were in Bolivia were
always determined by that which was not capitalist. In reality, the
capitalists themselves were invested not in bourgeois values but in
the symbols of the seigneurial world.
The bulk of capital was reinvested in land. The silver miners,
gradually displaced from mining and commerce, used their
money to acquire rural properties and build extravagant
palaces in keeping with the seigneurial way of life that they
enjoyed. Pacheco bought numerous estates in the city of
Sucre [ . . . ] Arce, at the end of the nineteenth century, found
himself in possession of a number of haciendas—La Barca,
La Lava, Santa Rosa, La Oroya—and several houses in Sucre
and Potosí. [ . . . ] In the outskirts of the city of Sucre were
the famous Palacio de la Glorieta de los Argandoña and the
sumptuous La Florida property, built by Arce, ‘where French
cooks presided over gigantic ovens, European grooms
watched over the stables, [ . . . ] black overseers, corpulent
and lustrous, [ . . . ] travelled the roads on horseback seeing
to the needs of that bustling hive of activity.’14
They were, then, a bourgeoisie with a pre-bourgeois mentality,
which can perhaps be explained by Kula’s observation that ‘the delim­
itation of two sectors [ . . . ] does not lead to a classification of the

14 Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata, p. 110.

114 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

different enterprises in two categories, but often occurs within

each’;15 the ruling class had a split soul in which capitalist and pre­
capitalist elements coexisted.
This has been explained on the basis of the premise that an
interest in the land as a marketable asset for the acquisition of small-
scale capital runs parallel to the interest in maintaining a stable
income’, which would prevent us from ‘falling into purely superstruc-
tural explanations that attribute the agricultural backwardness of the
country solely to the feudal ‘mentality’ of its ruling class’.16
There was, then, a certain rationality proper to to the seigneurial
stratum or substrata. We can counter this in this way: if the most
primitive horizon of visibility of the bourgeoisie is assumed, the
world is conceived from the perspective of profit, and profit, there­
fore, can just as well come from usury or from the capitalist use of
slavery, which indeed conforms to a certain style of rationality.
This recalls [Eugene] Genovese’s argument about the American
South:
In the South extensive and complicated relations with the
world market permitted the growth of a small commercial
bourgeoisie. The resultant fortunes flowed into slaveholding,
which offered prestige and economic and social security
in a planter-dominated society. [Independent merchants
found their businesses dependent on the patronage of the

15 Witold Kula, Teoría económica del sistema feudal (México City: Siglo XXI,
1979), cited in Juan Carlos Garavaglia, ‘Un modo de producción subsidiario:
la organización económica de las comunidades guaranizadas durante los sig­
los XVII-XVIII en la formación regional altoperuana-rioplatense in Carlos
Sempat Assadourian, Ciro Flamarión S. Cardoso, Horacio Ciafardini, Juan
Carlos Garavaglia and Ernesto Laclau, Modos de producción en América Latina
(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1973), pp. 161-92.
16 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘La expansión del latifundio en el Altiplano
boliviano: Elementos para la caracterización de una oligarquía regional,
Allpanchis: Revista de Pastoral Andina 13 (1979): 189—218; here, p. 196.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 115

slaveholders.] The merchants either became planters them ­

selves or assumed a servile attitude towards the planters.17
Seigneurial reason, however, was not bourgeois reason and, in
any case, it was not rationalistic; it is a rationality internal to the irra-
tionalist premise of the existence of a caste. The notion of a feudal
‘mentality’, therefore, although it is perhaps too convenient an expla­
nation, nonetheless has real objective validity. Even what was
obtained through capitalist activity was squandered in a seigneurial
fashion. The reason for this was none other than the nonexistence,
even as a remote project, of intellectual reform. It is easy, moreover,
to see the extent to which political power, ideology and juridical and
daily life were nothing like their capitalist models. After all, the Indi­
ans were forced to pay the indigenous tribute simply because they
the were Indians, that is, because of their racial status. This was a
national tax on the Indians. One could not ask for a more structural
example of legal inequality.
There is no need, at least for now, to focus on the remote origins
of capitalism in Bolivia. This is a task that requires further empirical
research which should take into account the various forms of disar­
ticulation or alienation that the population experienced even before
the Spaniards as well as the consequences of that kind of bootlegging
racket that was the colonization of the east, and the fleeting nature
of the subsequent surplus, with no process of accumulation. We can,
however, discern the forms of the current stage of capitalism, which
emerges, let us say, in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century (and
indeed this has been done). The origin of this bourgeoisie, that of
the silver mines, is no doubt the latifundia; or, more precisely, it is
the small hacienda, that is, ‘a sector of the oligarchy that was much
less differentiated [than the large landowners], which involved a vari­
ety of activities among which the most stable was the hacienda’.18

17 Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy

and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), p. 20.
18 Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘La expansión del latifundio en el Altiplano boliviano’,
p. 213.
116 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Of this there is doubt: the only stable business in Bolivia was the
Indians. We should add that this caste’s only innate and unrenounce-
able belief has always been the conviction of its superiority over the
Indians, a non-negotiable belief, with or without liberalism, with or
without Marxism.
The precapitalist trap, moreover, was only comparable to the
social siege laid by the Indians. Consequently, the surplus from the
small hacienda and from trade, especially that of luxury goods, was
the basic source of the capital’ of men like Aramayo or Arce. In any
case, as Genovese said, ‘the road to power lay through the plantation’.19
Even in the mines, the workers were paid as far as possible in
kind, that is, in products that often came from their employers’ lands.
And this was not the only precapitalist or protocapitalist aspect. The
ccajchas, for example, functioned in a way that resembles what has
been called the putting-out system. They were own-account (petty-
bourgeois) workers commercially subordinated to capital but with
no productive relation to it, in the sense that they did not work under
its command. The ‘voluntary mita or doblada are certainly not cap­
italist forms of exploitation or recruitment. It is reasonable to main­
tain that, from the very moment the Spaniards set foot on these
lands, the most consistent precapitalist element is the theft of labour
power. All the phases of capitalism to this day have been based on
this logic of appropriation and this translates, naturally, into demo­
graphic indices.
In any case, ‘inclinations’ or great existential choices prove most
eloquent when it comes to the miners’ vision of the world, granted
only as the upper echelon of the dominant bloc. Theirs were not
bourgeois sentiments. They are related, on the one hand, to the
almost obsessive association with foreign capital (Chilean or British
or French), and, on the other, to investment in land. The two great
phases of originary accumulation in Bolivia (the silver and tin sur­
pluses), then, involve at once the insertion of Bolivian capitalism in

19 Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, p. 29.

 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 117

imperialist capital and the reactionary reconstitution of land tenure,

both aspects of great importance, as we shall see. Xenophilia here is
a school of thought and not just a method of economic management.
This makes sense because the oligarchy is not only dominant but also
foreign for a long time and in a way it maintains a sense of being in
a country to which it nonetheless does not belong. The oligarchic
caste failed definitively in the task of becoming rooted in the land,
although it is also true that it has lost all connection to a lineage.
Evoking vague symbols, its stunned spirit is trapped in a kind of
reminiscence of its foundation on this soil and knows only that it
must submerge itself at all times in a power that comes from outside
(because its power has always been backed from the outside) and,
above all, and this is its true religion, that it must maintain its
supremacy over the Indians. It is an abhorrence without end.
As for the prestige of landownership, its relation to social status,
it is not difficult to discern its origin. It is the function of the ancestral
home. Here, however, it assumes a particular form because the land
operates as a social fetish. There is a radical disregard for productive
practice. The function of the lord is vertical. He is a state functionary
who collects the surplus and, in turn, impedes the peasants access
to the market. The market and the world must exist through the lord.
This, however, is what gives the system a kind of rationality:
Most of the elements of irrationality were irrational only
from a capitalist standpoint. The high propensity to con­
sume luxury goods, for example, has always been functional
(socially if not economically rational) in aristocratic soci­
eties, for it has provided the ruling class with the facade nec­
essary to control the middle and lower classes.20
*

Hence the somewhat tiresome tone assumed in the recurring debates

over free trade and protectionism, considered true historical parties

20 Ibid., p. 18.
118 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

at least over the course of the nineteenth century—protectionists,

crucistas and belcistas; free traders, ballivianistas, linaristas, the ‘reds’
and the conservatives. The doctrine of free trade and its historical
party triumphed decisively, with everything that this party contained,
which was not, of course, only free trade. Here a programme and
even a human group as such, a part of the oligarchy as a whole, comes
out victorious and is given the chance to put its conception of the
world into practice. One might reasonably ask if this history would
have been very different if their enemies had prevailed, but this is a
purely academic question and its pointless to speculate about the
counterfactual.
The debate in itself is insubstantial. However, its terms are
suggestive: ‘Under [protectionism] it was a question of concretely
supplanting a technical insufficiency and weakness with the afore­
mentioned measures, of prolonging the agony of colonial industrial
production, based on feudal servitude and gamonalismo!21
Of course, if protectionism is not attended by intellectual reform
or a substantive embourgeoisement of beliefs and habits, it is nothing
but the protection of backwardness. Marx said this most emphati­
cally. But the context must be taken into account. The truth is that
no latecomer has ever industrialized without protectionist policies.
In the reductio ad absurdum of these positions, one would have to
hand countries over to imperialism in order to accelerate the global
development of the forces of production. But what good would it do
to develop a country’s forces of production if it is no longer a nation?
There is a tendency to take the side of free trade or protectionism as
if these were final objectives, of value in themselves. What is impor­
tant, rather, is the subject of free trade or protectionism and the
moment in which one policy or the other is applied. The British or
the Americans alternate between the two in their economic history,
the only constant being their national interest or self-referentiality,

21 Guillermo Lora, Historia del movimiento obrero boliviano, VOL. 1 (La Paz:
Los Amigos del Libro, 1967), p. 80.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 119

which is, as we have seen, one of the aspects of bourgeois transfor­

mation that did not come to fruition here. It is Machiavelli who made
the world revolve around the raison detat, which is to say, the reason
of the nation-state and of sovereignty. ‘The “conquest of the desert”
between 1840 and 1870 fused Chilean and European interests in such
a way that their conceptual separation proves problematic.’22
A conceptual separation of Arce and the Chileans was equally
impossible. The proof of this lies in that he did not hesitate to impose
protectionist measures, but in favour of Chilean trade, after Bolivia’s
defeat. A nation, in short, favours peace when peace is to its benefit
and war when war will strengthen it. It will therefore choose free
trade or protectionism depending on its ends and for this it first has
to desire itself, to determine itself.
Marx, of course, defended protectionism in other circumstances.
In any case, a reading of Marx through literal and scattered citations
is impossible because there are certainly more than a few cases in
which his diatribes are intermixed with his arguments. And we must
also take into account the constraints of his time. We could say that
the myth of indefinite progress enveloped everything then, including,
of course, at least at certain moments, Marx himself. It was the idea
that the development of the forces of production, through their
quantitative expansion, would entail necessary qualitative changes,
that progress would correct history’s vices. The privileging of pro­
duction in socialist experiments and the deferral of the political tasks
of socialism is to some extent part of this legacy. In any case, Marx’s
prognosis that British investment in India would result not only in
the development of the forces of production but also in the bourgeois
revolution itself was an economistic and linear idea; British capital­
ism in India in fact deepened the precapitalist and ossified caste sys­
tem; when India came to face its bourgeois revolution, it had to do
so against the caste system and against the British.

22 Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata, p. 93.

120 * RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

We are therefore more interested in studying the men, the

classes, the contents and politics behind protectionism and free
tra d e -in other words, not what free trade or protectionism are in
the abstract but what they have been historically in Bolivia. We would
also have to consider the transformations within each party because
Santa Cruz, the founder of protectionism, liberalized his party when
he needed British support for the Confederation, and Palmerston
respected him but not as the leader of a protectionist party. Linares,
meanwhile, adopted protectionist measures although he is indis­
putably the founder of the creed of free trade.
Santa Cruz and Belzu, on the other hand, were protectionists of
very different sorts. While Santa Cruz’s protectionism was geared
towards to the owners of the workshops, and combined with a reac­
tionary agrarian policy, Belzus was something else: ‘Through the
mouths of superiors [ . . . ] the savage sensations, passions and fears
of the mestizo masses of that society emerged from below.’23
Belzu represented, then, as Moreno notes, protectionism for arti­
sanal production, slanted towards an appeal to the artisans them­
selves, and beyond this, nothing less than an alliance between the
populist military faction, the artisans and the Indian peasant mobi­
lization. In any case, it is entirely obvious that Belzus protectionism
included the masses and trade liberalism did not. That Belzu repre­
sented and desired the mobilization of the masses completely
changes the nature of his protectionism. It was not, then, simply a
hostile defence of regressive productive techniques. In essence,
Belcismo expressed the domestic market to which the in te rp e lla te
process centred in Potosí gave rise and perhaps in its rough outlines
it was a programme with an economic content similar to that of
Amaru’s movement. In any case, to deny the ‘mestizo masses’ of the
artisans the defence of their production would in effect be equivalent
to a denial of the communities’ right to fight for their survival. These

23 Gabriel René Moreno, Bolivia y Argentina: Notas biográficas y bibliográficas

(Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1901), p. 320.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 121

were conservative acts of desperate masses and it’s true that their vic­
tory would have led to a wretched fate, but this does not make their
enemies right.
We have, on the other hand, what we might call the unconscious
tasks of history. As we shall see when we review the conditions of the
formation of the modern multitude in the twentieth century, this,
the multitude, does not exist in itself but in the form of its determi­
nation. In general, it is said that the crisis of the state and, above all,
its hegemonic fraying is the aperture through which the constitution
of the multitude emerges. Belzu, like Katari, interpellated the masses.
Its true that the Bolivian masses have a tumultuous and violent char­
acter, like Katari; they would thereafter be belcistas in a paradigmatic
way, with their cult of spontaneity and the notion that the movement
creates itself. In any case, for whatever reason, the introduction of
the masses into history precipitated by Belzu (although not only by
him) is what gives the period its true dimensions because it is part
of the acquisition of a temperament.
Belzu, therefore, like Amaru and Katari, was the bearer of a pro­
gressive rallying flag in an objective sense. This does not require even
that the objective tasks coincide with a consciousness of them. The
artisans, for example, were an objectively more advanced force than
other sectors of Bolivian society at the time. Like the forasteros of the
countryside, they exhibited different levels of a state o f separation.
There is an important distinction to be made here. The forastero is
literally detached from his traditional connection to the land; his
condition in agriculture itself is already the condition of a man who
has broken his ancestral ties because he is either in a land that is not
his or that is his without imposing upon it the general paraphernalia
of ideologemes that come with ancestral belonging. The artisan,
meanwhile, is an individual and, if he has not been separated from
his means of production, he benefits from the relative concentration
of the city; he is an urban, or concentrated, individual. Forasteros,
ccajchasy belcista artisans are part of the social legacy out of which
the proletariat would later emerge.
122 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

We must keep in mind this question of the internal market as

school. That is, the internal market is internal because it refers to
itself or at least tends towards self-referentiality. It is a web of interests
that want to be consolidated. We are of course speaking here of a
market that was in the process of being dissolved, of what was left of
this market after the conquest of the ports by British trade. However,
two aspects of Belzu’s actions warrant our attention. In the first place,
the precocious recognition of the agitative, sometimes overwhelming
role that the masses would assume in the history of the country, that
is, the early detection of a factor that could never be ignored there­
after. This categorically contradicts the fantasy of the suppression or
mediation of the multitude, which is proper to the political thought
of the social Darwinists. The second is related to self-determinative
tendencies. Perhaps because of the exogenous extraction of those
who came from Europe to occupy a privileged position, perhaps
because they were always few in number and with the threat from
within they had to appeal continually for help from outside, whatever
the reason, it is a fact that the oligarchy had no impetus towards self-
determination. On the contrary, perhaps with the exception of Santa
Cruz, when it comes to matters of sovereignty, it has always acted
with absolute cowardice, as though surrendering from the outset—
and this is true even today. In any event, in his relationship with
Bustillo, in regard to the Chilean question, in his difficult relations
with Lloyd, the British minister, and even with Brazil, although his
general project lacked a vision of its subsequent development, it is
unquestionable that Belzu had clear ideas about the conflicts that
awaited Bolivia in the future.
We might say that the history of the country, those tensions that
had sedimented within a sociability so little given to eclecticism, had
sketched out the context of two parties, at once fundamental and
fundamentalist, so that whatever occurred beyond their limits,
whether it assumed the form of caudillism or of juridico-formal
(constitutionalist, etc.) disputes, was but the superstructure or phe­
nomenon of a deeper struggle. From even a minimally impartial
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 123

perspective, we must recognize that each of these parties or class fac­

tions retained its position within the social order and that they were
situated at entirely different ranks, just as they differed in their objec­
tives in terms of their followings and even styles of action and, ulti­
mately, in their whole conception of things. Still, both organized their
inimical, contradictory existence within the same civil society. There
was, of course, in the popular party a natural tendency to see every­
thing from an inland perspective and there is no doubt that the
seigneurial bloc, as we have seen, by blood, by virtue of its spiritual
inheritance and by the most implacable necessities of group instinct,
tended to see the world outside its borders as a source of civilization
and of certainty. Still unstructured and with an overwhelming bur­
den of collective unconscious contents, the two projects, nonetheless,
had been born here and of the contradictions of this place, and they
were therefore the legitimate offspring of the history of this society.
From this point of view, it surely makes no sense to label the plebeian
project as national and the elite, seigneurial project as inherently
antinational, and such a claim merely demonstrates an affiliation
or prejudice. Xenophilia was certainly the characteristic feature of
melgarejismo before and after Melgarejo and for all practical pur­
poses Arces appeasement so closely approximated total desertion
that he could scarcely be differentiated from that ferocious soldier.
For this caste, however, the Indians were not only not the soul of the
nation but also the fundamental obstacle to its existence.
We might attempt a rough summary of this antagonism as fol­
lows: A protectionist seigneurial current, that of Santa Cruz or that
which he embodied at least in his early period, was added over the
long term to a bloc made up of the artisanal sectors, bound by a solid
legacy whether or not it was viable as the embryo of a capitalist pro­
ject, and by the interests of the traditional peasantry that then and
for a long time after would revolve around the defence of the com­
munities, which is what they had fought tooth and nail to preserve
of the past. This bloc, complex in its totality, is bonded by the cement
124 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

that was the weak currency, a false solution which was nonetheless
the only one possible, and had no chance of coming to power until
it intersected with the division, through Belzu, of the repressive appa­
ratus that was then the whole state or almost the whole state. Imme­
diate violence was in reality the only manifestation of the force of
that state that had not managed to solve its most basic problems.
We have, on the other hand, the seigneurial party organized
around the general principle of free trade. It consists of landowners
who in their origins belong to either the core of the seigneurial or to
its fringe, who accumulate wealth by way of commercial capital,
through which they are linked to the dynamic zones of British influ­
ence, Chile in particular, that had developed within the logic of the
replacement of an economy of state monopolies and interior centres
by one of ports, which signals the passage from colony to indepen­
dence, especially following the Peace of Utrecht. It would perhaps be
useful to add some remarks here on the seigneurial as nucleus, and
its fringe or periphery. No ruling class or caste exists in isolation; it
must have a kind of‘reserve army’ or area of irradiation surrounding
it. If it has been said that the ideas of the ruling class are ‘in every age
the ruling ideas’, it is because, whatever their degree of latent legiti­
macy, their hegemonic reach or seductive capacity as a discourse
must at least reach the area called the effective majority’ within the
sphere of the state, that is, the decisive areas in terms of social control.
It is the sector of oligarchic reinforcement. This is what explains the
easy relations between Melgarejo and Adolfo Balliviân or between
poor hidalgos like Arce and Pacheco and the Aramayos—that is,
from a long-term perspective, the oligarchy is the nucleus that emits
the seigneurial interpellative call along with all those who believe in
it and, above all, its margin of recruitment or reserve. It is important
to take into account here the draw of upward mobility via politics or
economic accumulation. Neither Montes nor Barrientos belonged to
the seigneurial elite but only to its area of credibility or co-optation,
which cannot include truly popular men. It is a sector equivalent to
what Genovese calls that of the ‘poor whites*.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 125

If projects arise out of the nature of things, if reality itself orga­

nizes them, this is nonetheless something that requires organic
thinkers. Here it was certainly a task that demanded a concerted effort
because it unified a sector that was deeply submerged in gamonalismo
—in an absolute particularism—around an objective, which required
that it generate desire and the universality of consensus within the
class. That indeed such a project was organized in this way three
times—first with Melgarejo and the conservatives, then with the
Federal Revolution and, finally, with the democratic Revolution of
1952—speaks to the vitality of the seigneurial caste. In the process
of this programme of reconstruction, we see the element of decision,
the presence of the factual and the contingent in the central ideolog­
ical construct of a political project. It would seem here that the oli­
garchy for an instant abandons the erratic style that had defined it
until then. Melgarejo, for example, was a caudillo and so was Belzu,
which means that the concept of the caudillo as such has no speci­
ficity in itself, because Melgarejo was savagely reactionary and Belzu
was a caudillo of the masses. In any case, the ‘reds’, although they
resorted to the most degenerate forms of corruption, and although
they gladly took refuge in systemic impunity and generalized violence
with Melgarejo, had previously resorted to a cathartic and ethicist
programme with Linares, which proclaimed a silent dictatorship as
a path of purification. Ultimately, they would inherit [Tomas] Frias
[Amettler] s constitutionalist project, which was the first minimally
viable proposition of rationally verifiable forms of power.
In the middle of this clamour of ambitions, desertions and
atrocities, what was clear is that a programme was growing in the
belly of this class. This teaches us that a party’s programme can only
be seen ex post, when it has been realized. What one says of oneself
is indeed not so important as what one carries within oneself, the
force of ones determinants, which are almost never consciously
known. Arces or Pacheco’s official and general practice of bribery
was the execution of Frias’ programme. This was inevitable because
one who does not have consent must buy it. This stage, that of the
126 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

pseudoverifiable formation of power, would last a long time—with

some variations, until 1978. This continual practice of electoral fraud
and bribery, which was like a fools’ game in which one is convinced
of having won after having given himself the marked card, would last
as long as it did because of a strange circumstance. Frias’ proposal
meant only that the success of the purely factual mode of enunciation
of power was over. The stubborn application of these principles
demonstrated, however, that even corrupt elections could have a cer­
tain effect of legitimation in a way that pure factual power does not.
All this, however, was nothing more than the theatrics of char­
latans and casuits. With Melgarejo, who was implacable and corrupt,
or with Linares, who was pure and implacable, with Ballivian, who
had been legitimately elected but by no more than four families, or
with Pacheco and Arce, electoral fraudsters in the truest sense, the
ascendent programme was the reconstruction of the oligarchic caste
and the terms of its material existence in the world; this, with regard
to its two central ventures that were mining—with all that this
implied in addition to itself—and that kind of conquest of the land
that was the double expansion of the latifundia, along with every­
thing it entailed.
*

To sum up: to say that the people contains the nation or is the nation
itself is true only in the sense that if the nation does not include the
whole people it is not truly national. To be a nation is to recognize
all as the same, in some measure and in a particular habitat. This,
however, would be a romantic version of nationalization, which is
often a far more imperative and authoritarian event. It would seem
logical to posit a process in which men act together to produce some­
thing common to all but not specifically corresponding to any of
them. This is what best approximates the democratic revolution
understood as a national revolution. It is a somewhat chimerical idea.
In reality, nationalization has occurred through passive revolution,
by the junker path, and of course there have been reactionary or
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 127

forced nationalizations, just as there have been processes of nation­

alization through a negative hegemony, and peoples tend to be the
belated protagonists of processes to which they have been summoned
under strictly enforced predefined terms. The statist constitution of
the nation no doubt has to do with this kind of process.
We can say then that in principle there was no reason to deny the
Arce-Baptista (Montes, etc.) project a certain national significance,
although placing at its apex or point of convocation the seigneurial
caste in the flesh. In their conception, of course, few programmes are
intrinsically perverse. The past weighs heavily on men, however, and
we can see how much good it did the generation of 1880 in Argentina,
for example, to have almost no past. The depravity of its dissolute and
treasonous history marked this project in a way that we could call
melgarejista, in its inward vision—the land problem—as well as in
the way in which it saw the other’, that is, the foreigner. We might say
that the former consisted from start to finish in taking all they could
and the second in turning over to foreign hands whatever was asked.
The first legal measures of this virtual expropriation of the
indigenous communities in favour of white and mestizo landowners,
which translated into a feudalization of the countryside at least in
the most populated areas of the country, were enacted by Melgarejo
in 1866 but continued uninterrupted well into the twentieth century.
Consequences were quick to follow. Just a few years later,
Santiváñez could write this:
These great accumulations (of landed property, acquired
through the plunder of the comunarios) are precisely a con­
sequence of the law of the 20th of September. Six or seven
hundred landowners had replaced 75,000 comunario fami­
lies; and if, as the defenders of this law affirm, the value of
community lands rose to 40 or 50 million, it is clear that,
having sold more than three-quarters of it, 700 landowners
were worth 30 or 40 million previously held by 75,000.24

24 Cited in Luis Antezana Ergueta, ‘La reforma agraria campesina en Bolivia

(1956-1960)’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología 31(2) (1969): 261.
128 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

We might say that it was a general seizure of the territory of one

class by another and, indeed, in large measure, of one race by another.
Silvia Rivera [Cusicanqui] notes, in accordance with available
data on the expansion of the feudal agrarian regime in the provinces
of Pacajes of the department of La Paz between 1881 and 1920, which
is the period that interests us:
8.4 per cent of the buyers acquired 66.8 per cent of the land,
while what we might call the ‘middle stratum, which con­
stituted 20.6 per cent of the total buyers, acquired 26.1 per
cent of the land and the remaining 71 per cent of the buyers
acquired only an area equivalent to 7.1 per cent of the land.25
To give a sense the proportions of this general dispossession:
until 1860 only 10 per cent of the land was in the hands of ‘feudal
hacendados while the remaining 90 per cent belonged to the peas­
ants. Antezana calculated that ‘the number of communities exceeded
10,000 and there were not a thousand haciendas in all the altiplano
and the central valleys’.26
Dispossession not only modernized social stratification but also
translated it into a kind of second serfdom: ‘If previously the greater
part of the land belonged to the peasants (and these were free men),
beginning with Melgarejos programme, most of the land was con­
verted into feudal haciendas and free men became colonos and serfs
bound to the land.’27
This was the process of transformation of the comunario into the
pongo [servile worker on an estate]. What is at issue here, then, is the
question of the fate of reforms, or of their reception.
The justification for the juridico-military assault on the lands of
the Indians and on the communities was that they would be turned

25 Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘La expansión del latifundio en el Altiplano boliviano’,

p. 204.
26 Luis Antezana Ergueta, Bolivia: ¿Reforma o revolución agraria? (Caracas:
Poleo, 1976).
27 Ibid., p. 24.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 129

into productive lands from a capitalist perspective. The proof that

appearances deceive is that, formally, ‘disentailment* was no different
from the clearing of the land and the task of the English bourgeoisie
in their assault on the enclosures. As for the other part of the pro­
gramme, the insistence on a conceptual non-separation from foreign
capital and the laissez-faire policy with respect to the national terri­
tory, an obsessive xenophilia comparable only to the obsession of El
Dorado, we could also argue that it was a certain mode o f ‘being in
the world’ for a country that felt, with good reason, outside the world.
Ultimately, even the Meiji opened* Japan.
Why, indeed, did the Black Plague produce bourgeois depeas-
antization in England and a second feudalism in Germany? The same
social fact was received by different minds; each country lived it in
its own way. How did they rationalize these reforms that were, ulti­
mately, the most radical attempt to initiate a reactionary programme
of economic development? For the seigneurial man, his dominium,
his ius abutendi or sovereignty, refers to his own land, to which his
lineage is connected, and not to the nation. Personal honour, an arro­
gance and supreme authority derived from a lineage take the place
of national sentiment. While the silver surplus of Potosí flowed copi­
ously over the caste, the Indians were successful in the preservation
of traditional forms of organization, which does not mean that they
were completely traditional.
Whether through outright theft of the land by military force, as
with Melgarejo and Montes, or through purchase under invariably
iniquitous conditions, there is no doubt that the object was the
expansion, consolidation and supremacy of the seigneurial caste at
the Indians’ expense. The Indian is in effect the only recognized
enemy of the state at the level of its substantive desires. The natural­
ness with which from Linares to Melgarejo the introduction, estab­
lishment and development of Chilean capital (and Chilean settlement
in the area) was permitted, that sort of fascination with which the
miners became attached to it and then set out to install themselves
at the head of their conquests, according to Arces formula, all this is
130 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

not easy to explain. It is indeed astonishing. Objectively, it indicates

the general feeling of a certain alienation of an entire social sector.
In reality we should understand this in terms of the decadence or
sickness of a hereditary caste. Servitude degraded the daily life of
these men who later (and to this day) would become accustomed to
seeing as mere facts of their routine existence what in reality were
acts of a strange spiritual perversity. This is what brings them to a
sustained practice in the manner of Melgarejo of what in principle
might have had some hint of rationality (reactionary but rational).
The problem, then, has to do with their fundamental conception of
the world. Baptista, for example, who is an exemplary figure here,
certainly loved Bolivia but was not prepared to abandon his preju­
dices for this reason. And so they behaved in an antinational way,
although they perhaps believed themselves to be following projects
that would benefit the nation. Under the banner of capitalist devel­
opment, that is, of progress, they brought together all the conditions
of its impossibility.
Free trade did not bring about the bourgeois revolution, or a non­
revolutionary bourgeois accumulation, or even, ultimately, the intro­
duction of the anticipated capital. In short, their worldview, which is
what matters here and not the proclamation of free trade, was incom­
patible with all forms of ‘progress’ and not just with one of them. It
would certainly have been madness to entrust the task of intellectual
reform to a man like Baptista, who was the personification of counter­
reformism; it might as well have been entrusted to Torquemada. On
the other hand, if we consider the faction of his rivals, those who are
accused and guilty of being utterly prebourgeois, we would have to
see if they did not carry in embryonic form certain secular and
egalitarian elements without which no democratic revolution would
have been possible, including that of 1952.
The combination of the real or supposed xenophobia of Belzu
and his protectionism is of course all too reminiscent of Dr Francia
[José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco]. One certainly could
argue that, whatever the circumstances, Belzu’s expulsion of Lloyd
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 131

was preferable to Megarejo’s ceding Ladario in exchange for a horse.

This xenophobia, at least as practised in a country that is in fact belea­
guered on all sides as Bolivia was then, engenders incipient feelings
of sovereignty. Certainly Belzu made too much of a distinction
between the British and the Bolivian but Arce made no distinction
at all between what was Chilean or British and what was Bolivian.
And Belzu s pact was with the artisans and the peasants, essen­
tially comunarios, that is, noncapitalist and perhaps not even precap­
italist classes. We are more interested in the way in which the
bourgeois revolution transforms principles and elements that are not
at all capitalist at their inception into capitalist ones, what we might
call the embourgeoisement of ideas: we might cite here the French
Revolution as the transformation of Frenchmen from Catholics to
deists. It is a true feat of the art of politics to make god and the god­
dess of reason coexist in the same space, and the French did just this.
The English artisans became inventors, and for this to occur the
atmosphere could no longer be artisanal and hence the story that
each woman felt herself to be the darling of the king, etc. One might
also ask how capitalist’ the peasants that rose up in the name of the
myth of the ‘freeborn Englishman and in response to the suppression
of their rights to the commons were. These are elements of what
Thompson has called ‘the moral economy of the crowd’ and are not
merely the riotous diversions of backward populations. In reality,
there is not a single capitalist revolution in which the demands of
these kinds of not-yet-capitalist masses are not present; this very
action of the masses is a necessary condition of both the bourgeois
and the proletarian revolutions, of capitalism and of socialism.
It remained to be seen, on the other hand, what was to replace
the internal market of Potosí, defended ex post by Belzu’s skilled
workers, which was after all the only one, good or bad, that had ever
existed. The indigenous community, meanwhile, was the traditional
form of the only originary agricultural model of the country; it still
remained to be proven whether the new haciendas in the hands of
the enterprising, active, intelligent white race’ of which [José Vicente]
132 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Dorado spoke28 would in fact be more productive. Indeed, very

shortly afterwards, Santiváñez would practically prove the opposite
and even the supposed reconstruction of the communities before
195229 in no way demonstrates the superiority of the hacienda in this
form at least over the communities.
Things did not turn out as projected. What we might call the
artisanal-commercial form of the internal market was destroyed, or
its destruction was completed, but this only unleashed and renewed
in a centrifugal manner what was unresolved, deteriorated and latent
in the national question. Meanwhile, disentailment meant only a shift
in terms of the application or collection of the surplus, because,
strictly speaking, production itself, as a primary act, remained more
or less untouched in its original form, whether in the communities
or these so-called haciendas and even in a large portion of small­
holdings. In short, at least in these areas (the altiplano and the val­
leys), other ways of working the land are practically unknown.
In our view, all this must be understood in other terms. It is
indisputable that the two projects had as their object the capitalist
development of Bolivia, and here we must consider the very different
fate that a country can have depending on whether one form of cap­
italism or another develops. In both cases, there was a conceptual
failure because they were non-contemporary visions of the contem­
porary. Protectionism, of course, never produces anything as such,
that is, closing things off in no way guarantees their transformation
and, moreover, the civilized form of existence in the world of our
time is to exist at a certain distance from it but at the same time
within it. To suppose, on the other hand, that the métropoles,
through free trade, would come to develop Bolivia as a nation and
even to preserve it is like a tale full of sound and fury told by an idiot.

28 José Vicente Dorado, ‘Proyecto de repartición de tierras y venta de ellas

entre los indígenas* (Sucre: Tipografía de Pedro España, 1864). Cited in
Almaraz, El poder y la caída, p. 73.
29 Grieshaber, ‘Survival of Indian Communities in N ineteenth-C entury
Bolivia*.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 133

Every national project, capitalist or socialist, must develop the

legacy of its collective history (from its productive foundation to its
mode of being) until it achieves a modern form and so, for example,
there can be no advanced agriculture in Bolivia if it does not take
into account the foundation of the local traditional agricultural
regime and a true industrialization would have sought to base itself
in the distribution of what is called real subsumption in the previous
flesh-and-blood agents of transformation, that is, in the artisans. In
any case, the Darwinist elimination of all prior productive forms is
in no way a necessary condition for industrialization or capitalism
and much less for socialism. Utopian or not, Belzu’s project was
much closer to this kind of formulation. No country, and least of all
Bolivia, has ever been successful in importing a model of accumula­
tion. This is always local.
*

Bloch was ill-bred, neurotic and snobbish, and since he

belonged to a family of little repute, he had to support, as on
the floor of the ocean, the incalculable pressure of what was
imposed on him not only by the Christians upon the surface
but by all the intervening layers of Jewish castes superior to
his own, each of them crushing with its contempt the one
that was immediately beneath it.30
Marcel Proust

Such are the outlines of what can properly be called the battle of the
two bloodlines or lineages in Bolivia. It is a theme that pervades not
only this study but, of course, also the history itself that is its object.
Every society, in fact—we saw this in the case of Chile—has a col­
lection o f‘invisible beliefs’ or, as it were, a religion that binds it (reli-
gatio) in Durkheims sense of this concept. The production of the
social substance or general equivalence conceived as something that

30 Marcel Proust, In Search o f Lost Time, Volume 2: Within a Budding Grove

(C. K. Scott Moncrieff trans.) (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 374.
134 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

is not merely economic, in other words, the universal social cement,

all this refers to the same thing.
On the other hand, a society can have several articulations or
planes of articulation, something like different levels of life and of
consciousness, or a single central articulation can be the immediate
result of a pact among disparate elements, etc. The question of ide­
ological unity or unconscious identity is one that remains unresolved
in Bolivia because the two lineages or identities exhibit an unusual
persistence over time. In a way, they don’t want to be anything but
what they are and they understand this as a will not to belong to one
another, not to become integrated. It is an insistence on unfinished
forms, of a distinct provisionality, or that are lived as provisional
norms. This is significant and can even be advantageous in that in
the cases we have mentioned (in one more than the other) this kind
of dilemma, if it ever existed, was defined at least initially in a reac­
tionary way. Here, as we have said, we have a duel in which nobody
won. Bolivia did not become as viceroyalist as Peru and the besieging
obstinacy of the popular prevented the implantation of an anti-
indigenous authoritarianism like that of Chile. The ideas of the ruling
class have succeeded here in becoming the ideas of the whole society
only in a distorted, though persistent, way. However, before going
into a matter that is extremely dense in itself, we must make some
preliminary clarifications. To speak of two lineages is of course a sim­
plification but not if we understand by this two historical projects
that come into conflict with one another. It is a deeply rooted
pact and one that is unresolved. The terms themselves rather than
defining things can cause confusion because it is in reality a conflict
between mestizos—such is the extent to which our bloods have
mixed. We must therefore speak in terms of connotation or degree,
and here the racial basis of social rank is merely the support for a doc­
trine or vision of the order of things. Nor should it be concluded from
the name of this dispute that there was a separation of bloodlines; one
could say, on the contrary, that it is the form of interference of one in
the other and ultimately the impossibility of seeing one’s own face
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 135

without immediately seeing that of ones historical interlocutor that

characterizes this problematic of Bolivian intersubjectivity.
The origin of seigneurial mediation in this society or in any of
its American equivalents is unclear. Of course, we are familiar with
the prevailing ideas among the conquistadores themselves: iglesia o
mar o casa real.11 In any case, it entailed a certain degree of prestige
and of ease:
The pride of ennoblement was far greater in Castilla, where
the exemption from taxation, the ability to participate in the
leadership of the town and perhaps other factors of a psy­
chological nature made nobility more desirable. It was
enough to have the means to maintain a horse and arms and
then to be awarded military privileges.3132
This, a consequence perhaps of great military need, could not but
result in that
in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the nobility rep­
resented more than one-tenth of the population; in the
Basque Country this proportion approached 100 per cent
and in León 50 per cent, 25 per cent in Burgos and 14 per
cent in Galicia and Zamora.33
Romano and Tenenti credit the ‘second sons’ with giving a certain
coloring to seigneurialism in America:
The second wave of conquistadores includes an extraordi­
nary number o f‘second sons’, younger sons of families of the

31 [Literally, church or sea or royal court’, a proverb that is sometimes com­

pleted quien quiera medrar (‘he who would prosper’), or hacen y deshacen a
los hombres (‘make and unmake men’).]
32 [Jaime Vicens Vives, Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal and Guillermo Céspedes
del Castillo, Historia social y económica de España y América: Baja Edad
Media, Reyes Católicos, Descubrimientos, vol . 2 (Barcelona: Ed. Vicens-Vives,
1972), pp. 115-16.)
33 Chaunu, La España de Carlos V, pp. 225-7.
136 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

high, middle and lower ranks of the aristocracy, also poor

devils, in a way, but who had known in the houses in which
they were born the feudal way of life, with its myths, its ide­
als, and its customs. [For them] the problem consisted in
reconstructing a life that only the right of primogeniture had
denied them. Thus in America—on virgin soil—that feudal
world, which in Europe had taken its first blows, would be
revived. [To which they add]: They had the advantage that
the subjugated upon whom they exercised their rights were
racially different, [which] allowed them to establish espe­
cially durable and inflexible relations of oppression.34
The vast supply of Indians and the decomposition of the
metropolitan seigneurial system (the seventeenth century was one
of acute crisis in Europe) surely only reinforced these tendencies.
From the above descriptions alone we can infer that we are not
speaking of the seigneurial in the feudal European sense, which gen­
erally has other characteristics. Here it is something that is con­
structed in the encounter with the Indian and therefore it is prevalent
in the areas where the Indians were least vulnerable, where there was
some form of state. In fact, it is interesting to note that, although in
an immediate sense to have a state and a relation of consent to the
state confers a margin of power to a society, pre-state societies are
nonetheless more socially resilient. The basic point here, however, is
that where there is no Indian there is no lord. The master recognizes
himself in the slave; the Indian becomes the foundation of the iden­
tity of the lord: ‘The truth of independent consciousness is [ . . . ] the
servile consciousness of the bondsman.’35
The Indian, therefore, is the proof that the lord exists. This is
expressed, moreover, in the trauma of victory or the deformation
of the victor, which is a mode of being that always deceives itself:

34 Romano and Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno, pp. 185-6.
35 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology o f Spirit (A. V. Miller trans.) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 117 (§193).
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 137

‘[T]he lord [ . . . ] is the power over this thing, for he proved in the
struggle that it is something merely negative.’36
The slave is also the foundation of the ‘idealism’ of the master
because he, the master, is in a paradigmatic way the non-witness of
material transformation; on the contrary, he is the man who does
not touch the earth. So: ‘The lord relates himself mediately to the
thing through the bondsman.’37
This is, therefore, exactly the opposite of the command of capital
and the decline of the bourgeoisie begins when it abandons this func­
tion of productive leadership and is depersonalized in relation to
capital. This aspect is perhaps the most revealing of the conduct of
the seigneurial caste in relation to the fundamental productive act
of this society, which has always been agriculture. It is a sector that
does not participate except in the appropriation of the surplus, that
is, in the beginning of circulation, and, as a class that is in essence
circulationist, its power derives from the repressive and monopolistic
control of the market.
On the other hand, the slave or serf in a state of territorial frag­
mentation (although the very idea of the community raises doubts
about this) is no more apt as a witness to the transformation of nature
because he has access only to a magical or at least intuitive and pre-
rational experience; but at least in him the possibility of acquiring
that rationality exists since he is in close contact with the process of
transformation. The master, meanwhile, is external to it in practice,
is materially alien to the transformation of nature and, in his view,
the slave becomes the part of his being (of his body) that is in contact
with the thing. He sees, therefore, through the mediation of another.
In a somewhat crude understanding of the problem, the
seigneurial is identified (with the certainty common to all popular
conceptions) with the traditional ruling class, even over the course
of its mutations and successions, and in this sense the total lord, that

36 Ibid., p. 115 (§190).

37 Ibid., pp. 115-16 (§190).
138 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

is, lordship across time, resembles the total capitalist. This identifi­
cation is beyond doubt in that, in the conjunction of representation
and the repressive act, ‘fear of the lord is [ . . . ] the beginning of wis­
dom’38 and, ultimately, the conception of the world is universalized
until the slave effectively sees himself with the eyes of the master. If
hegemony arises with a class that considers itself capable of assimi­
lating the whole of society’,39 then this is a kind of hegemony.
In other words, the seigneurial articulation is that which is based
on an originary hierarchical pact, which can be factual or contrac­
tual, that is, it is not founded on equality but on an essential inequal­
ity among men. This is at once a mechanism for the construction of
consent because it constitutes a graduated hierarchical structure.
This means that there is always someone lower in rank (which can
be based on economic or racial criteria, or on lineage or even region).
The fact that no one is ever last and all are hijos de algo40 legitimates
the entire conceptual scale.
That the logic of the master becomes that of the slave is aptly
demonstrated in Memorial de los Charcas: ‘Now in this general visi­
tation that has been made by order of Don Franscisco of Toledo,
viceroy of these lands, we have been stripped of the authority and
lordship that we had over our subjects and vassals as though we were
not natural lords just as the dukes and counts and marquis are in
Spain, which we consider a great affront and injury.’41
Their desire, then, was to be assimilated into the Spanish power
structure and not for an instant the abolition of servitude, but the
return of their own Indian vassals [yanaconas]: ‘They have stolen all
the yanaconas we had by making them tributary Indians.’42

38 Ibid., pp. 117-18 (§195).

39 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 260.
40 The phrase (literally ‘son of som ething) is the basis for the term hidalgot
which is a nobleman.
41 Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, El memorial de Charcas: crónica inédita de
1582 (Lima: Ed. Univ. Nacional de Educación, 1969), n.p.
42 Ibid., n.p.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 139

On the other hand, the four years that Condorcanqui spent

demanding recognition of his seigneurial status in no way represent
a merely political act. It proves that there is a dissolution of pop­
ular identity based on this loyalty or spiritual submission to the
seigneurial, a loyalty that clearly permeates all levels of society. Here,
therefore, one who cannot claim the title of Spanish lord at least
claims that of pre-Spanish lord, but the seigneurial reasoning remains
intact. This valorization of the plethora of familial, racial, ethnic
and regional hierarchical fetishes is infinite in practice. It is perhaps
the most consistent conservative element of all those that exist in
Bolivian society, the most general reactionary feeling.
To be a lord here (not in the sense of being master of oneself but
in reference to those of inferior rank) is the ultimate object of life.
And there is no lord without land. The relation to the land easily
becomes feudal in the sense that it has no function except its sym­
bolic value and the surplus it produces (which means the remainder
after the reproduction of the productive act). We can speak then of
the disintegrative function or the triumph of the seigneurial within
the popular as the belief of the oppressed in the logic of the oppres­
sor; but we may also speak of the oligarchic consequences of the
seigneurial, that is, of the seigneurial in relation to itself.
What is at issue here is, first, the validity of the seigneurial as
mediation or more or less universal articulation instituted by the
crossing of the constitutive acts of this society; but also, in another
sense, we must ask whether there are forms of the popular that irra­
diate towards the seigneurial sphere itself.
As for the first aspect, we need not assume that because it tends
towards the gamonalization of the country, because it does not see
the territory as nation-state or in terms of sovereignty but as inher­
itance or property, because it is not founded on a centralized power
or it is founded on a power whose centralization is purely accidental,
because of the dispersion of the vassals. For all this, we need not
assume that the link between master and slave is interrupted. The
140 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

truth is that to oppress is to belong to the oppressed, and the more

personal the relation the more the slave contaminates the master with
his servitude. The slave is the sickness of the master and not his
freedom—he is his drug. It is, then, a destructive relation. It is some­
thing very different from the interaction between free men, where
one is created in the image of the other; they penetrate one another
but the freedom of one advances the freedom of the other and is in
some measure its precondition. We must differentiate therefore
between an oppressive solidarity and an organic and civil solidarity.
The quality of the interaction naturally has much to do with the
social optimum.
As for the second: All this is what impoverishes this society
because the slave is oppressed not by an individual master but by the
whole society, and this necessarily produces feelings of collective
guilt. The Germans, for example, only exhibit solidarity among
themselves against another or for irrational though profound rea­
sons; in their daily life they have no solidarity but, rather, something
like a resentment born of a sense of stagnation. Surely at the basis of
this neurosis is the seigneurial articulation, unification from above
or passive nationalization. Mutatis mutandis, we have seen that the
seigneurial also exists as a certain popular feeling in Bolivia, in that
a single drop of white blood will always allow one to feel more
respectable and worthy than the Indian, that is, it will ensure, in the
everyday self-conception of the people, that no one feels oppressed
or that everyone feels only relatively oppressed. The Indian, in turn,
and we are still referring the level of the quotidian, will wish not to
be Indian but to be Spanish or will think that he can be Spanish, that
is, he will dream as the oppressed dream rather than identify as
oppressed. This is the conservative ground or spirit of the of the his­
tory of the country, its most precapitalist and most general essence.
The persecuted here ensure the permanence of their persecution. We
shall see, however, that this is not incompatible with a certain popular
history.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 141

Disorder, for example, is one of the characteristic forms of spon­

taneous discontent. The duty of a man who suffers is to break the
order that causes his suffering. This inevitably leaves traces. Katari,
his tactics not always structured, is the founder of maximalism for
the Bolivian masses, while Amaru, the depeasantization of Potosí,
and the internal market that it generated, represent the structural-
democratic formulation of the nation, the legitimate ordering of the
democratic, and Belzu represents certain nascent forms of the masses
conceived as a sector captured by the state. This necessarily gives rise
to the construction of memory. We shall see even more clearly the
form that this acquisition of memory takes when we go into the anal­
ysis of the question of the proletariat. For now it is enough to assume
that memory exists as an organizing principle.
It is also clear that a kind of internal history of the seigneurial
caste exists, that is, not of the seigneurial as universal articulation
but of a caste that occupies a specific position within this specific
social formation. With this we return in a way to our point of depar­
ture in this chapter, to the relation between categorical forms and
their historical subsumption. Arce, for example, or Pacheco would
have been bourgeois in the same sense that Edison, Ford or Nobel
were, or as Dreyfus was in Peru and as North was in Chile. In effect,
if we adhere to the established and accepted definition, the bourgeois
is but the owner of the means of production who buys labour power
and transforms them both into productive capital. Of course each of
these men contained a historical world and what is concrete in them
within the general capitalist or bourgeois condition is the history of
the individual or national context of each. Dreyfus and North, for
example, are living representatives of the form that capitalism
assumed in those countries and we could even say that the extent to
which North became invested in Chiles military ventures while
Dreyfus did not in Peru reflects the form of insertion of each forma­
tion in the world system. What is said of one level—the capitalist qua
individual—is certainly valid to a far greater extent for other equally
142 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

general categories like the proletariat or mode of production or accu­

mulation. In short, these are categories that have no analytical utility
if they are not subsumed in historical analysis.
We can now return to the nature of the seigneurial bloc of the
second silver boom that, in its general outlines, founded the present
bourgeois mentality in Bolivia. The most eloquent, as we have seen,
is no doubt the mystery of its at once mythical and parasitic relation
to the land, conceived as an ideal patrimony or material foundation
of lordship, that is, as a kind of return to the origins of the bloodline.
In the civil war that this fervour would precipitate we shall see the
full extent of this insistence upon a retrogressive self-reconstruction.
This, added to the zeal to assimilate to foreign capital and for the for­
eign in general, clearly indicates the presence of what Tamayo called
a state of racial doubt. It is a general sense of loss or of uncertainty.
It has been said that this came from the contingency of an accumu­
lation based on the world market. A capitalism that does not under­
stand contingency does not understand capitalism. The whole logic
of the mode of production is based on the impersonality of collective
classes and on expanded reproduction, which is the negation of sim­
ple reproduction, something that should be anticipated from its very
nature.
On the other hand, its clear that the uncertainty of the Bolivian
oligarchic caste is existential in nature and is in effect a state of racial
uncertainty. They are, as Medinaceli said, Spaniards exiled in the
high plains but, at the same time, they have ceased to be Spaniards.43
It is a class that, moreover, has taken significant blows. It did not live
the Amaru rebellion as a political threat but in its immediate vio­
lence; but it is also extremely significant that the horizon of its wealth
collapsed with the colonial world because, in effect, the mercury cri­
sis only completed the work of independence. It is undeniable, on
the other hand, that none of those who noted the persistence of the

43 [On Gabriel René Moreno, see, for example, Carlos Medinaceli, Estudios
críticos (Sucre: Editorial Charcas, 1938), pp. 16-18.1
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 143

communities realized that it was an inevitable result of the form rep­

resented by Katari as well as of the struggle between the factions of
the Fifteen Years’ War, in which the very logistics of the war were
based on the practical erasure of the landowning class. The threat of
the mestizo and Indian masses is the ultima ratio of the racial uncer­
tainty of the oligarchic caste. It is a permanent siege that has made
the latter a defeatist and disloyal class. If we add to this events like
those of Belzu, Zarate and 1952, we have a necessarily demoralized
and profoundly perplexed class.
Under these conditions, it is indeed surprising that it would
regain its strength and develop a true project, that of its reconstruc­
tion, on the basis of its racial uncertainty. It was destined, however,
in putting this project into practice, to reproduce the ruined traces
of its life. Xenophilia and social Darwinism were in fact but the con­
sequences of an endogamic vision of the internal reproduction of the
caste that led to an incapacity for hegemonic interpellation, to the
reestablishment of the ideology of magical solutions or a mystical
idea of history and the unmediated exercise of conquered power. We
shall try to explain this even if only in summary terms.
Like many popular terms, that of the rosea44 has a meaning
worth taking into account. It underscores the endogamic mode of
reproduction of this caste and its conduct would be the same with
the conservatives as with the liberals and the neo-bourgeoisie of
1952. From the outset, for example, these are men of modest origins
in terms of their economic background, like Arce and Pacheco, or
even illegitimate sons of poor whites like Baptista. It is to this that
we refer when we speak of the oligarchic caste and its fringe or area
of recruitment or reserve. This has its own complex genealogical
organization because it is fundamentally a country of illegitimate and
poor relations, sometimes inferred on the basis of racial or regional
origins; in any case, there is a certain necessary permissiveness that

44 [Literally, a screw thread. A local term for the political and economic elite
during the period of the tin barons.]
144 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

can be called a tolerance of the one-eighth-blood’ among a few hun­

dred families, which excludes only the mestizo masses and the
strictly indigenous, the excluded within the excluded.
The reductiveness of the ideologemes that sum up this concep­
tion of the world is also instructive. Not to see the world as some­
thing essentially contradictory already reveals the existence of an
obscurantist worldview. Anthropocentrism, as such, means the sub­
stitution of revelation by doubt. That the Spaniards who came were
pre-Renaissance men is evident in the simplicity of their accounts of
conquests, discoveries and events in general, which are invariably
narratives of grandeur. No Spaniard then would have been able to
do anything like what Michelangelo did with I Prigioni, that is, the
transformation of inorganic matter into human action within a single
living being; anthropocentrism and its correlate, that is, a sense of
internal contradiction within all things was replaced here by a psy­
chology of Santiago y cierra España45 or by the myth of El Dorado.
The inevitable miracle of British capital or of the expropriation of
the land by the whites, that is, the propensity for simple solutions to
complex problems, reveals, beyond mere ignorance, a certain lack of
a sense of reality proper to periods of decadence. Arce thought that
surrendering to Chile would make Bolivia like Chile, and this is not
just a manner of speaking. The same goes for the dogma of free trade
that was, as always, destined to solve everything, or for the myth of
the railroad. How could one explain to such people that gunpowder
destroyed castles, but also ensured the survival of absolutism for a
long time?
From the distance of time, one might marvel at the frankness
with which the programme of oligarchic reconstruction is advanced,
whether we listen to Arce or Dorado or Muñoz or, above all, Baptista,
who was like the bearer of a revelation, as Salamanca would later be,
always on the hunt for a symbolic m an46 or charismatic solution that

45 [‘Santiago and close ranks, Spain, a famous battle cry o f the Reconquista.]
46 [An epithet for Salamanca (El Hombre Símbolo).]
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 145

never arrived. This, however, has a broader significance. The oli­

garchic caste, in its extreme backwardness, was incapable of marking
out an ideological emission or hegemonic ideology, because it did
not propose to seduce the Indians but to exterminate them. Hence
the transparency of the Darwinist dogma. Nor did it consider for an
instant accepting any form of mediation and whenever it could it
exercised power itself, at least with Pacheco and Arce. The fate of this
state system, as we shall see shortly, was that of all who fail to grasp
the function of the relative autonomy of the state, certainly a bour­
geois idea, so little understood by this bourgeoisie of Upper Peru.
But why should we be surprised, knowing that these were men who
had no notion that after all the principle of self-determination or
sovereignty or being for itself is something as central to the ‘rational
state’ or capitalist state as real subsumption itself? They served their
ghosts and thus they killed their sons.
*

As much as we hold all this to be valid, the truth is that social

Darwinism does not become a general ideology of all sectors of the
Bolivian elite until after the Federal Revolution. What the Peruvian
viceroyalists lived with Amaru the Bolivian oligarchs lived with
Willka. It was like a spectral enactment of their real position within
the unfolding of history. Indeed, it is worth noting how Willka would
become a kind of Amaru, although with local overtones, and how
the effects of the Chaco War would resemble those that the War of
the Pacific had had in Peru as an efficient cause of a certain con­
sciousness of things, more or less diffuse, and even of a certain intel­
ligentsia. In any case, the physiognomy of the present oligarchy is
that which emerges from this rupture or turn.
We can sum up what we have said up until now as follows: The
oligarchy itself broke out of a kind of historical hiatus that had been
prolonged, at least to some extent, by a certain lack of realism that
also meant, as we have seen, a deviation from reality. It bore the
146 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

weight of a tradition of language games as a substitute for thought

and a patent intellectual decadence that ultimately became a kind of
self-authorization (language games here almost paved the passage
from one social class to another). It also bore the burden of another
terrible, brutal truth—and that was the absence of exemplarity. It was
a class without heroes and therefore without anything on which to
found its cult of heroes, which is always a key element in aristocratic
legitimation. Those whom they called their heroes were like the
frontmen for something that never existed.
So, after the confusion of the mercury crisis and the devastation
of the civil war, after Bolivia’s erasure from the map or radical absence
in the world, something extraordinary emerges here: a project. This
cannot be attributed solely to the price of silver or to the new cheap
mercury from California. Silver is sought out of a will to exist and, as
Huallpa proved, existence is not derived from a fortuitous silver find.
As we have said, the act of oligarchic reconstruction is dis­
tributed among various figures and we might say that it occurs with
a certain quiet grandeur with Linares (who, if not for his great intel­
lectual poverty, would have been the father of the oligarchy along
with José Balliviân) and in an eccentric fashion with Montes; atro­
ciously with Megarejo, who gives the reconstruction its facticity
together with Arce, both founders of a kind of social method; with
a constitutional-legalist aspect with Adolfo Balliviân and Frias.
Baptista, Arce and Pacheco would distort and execute the project (by
bending it towards fraudulence, they made it possible).
In any case, it is clear that something like an oligarchic state
existed in the sense of the weak nomenclature of Latin American
sociology and we might even say that this is the state that existed
between 1880 and 1952. In this phase, as we have suggested, at least
for a long time a fraudulent method of legitimation was practised,
which means that fraud also produces a kind of political credibility
or legitimacy for the conservatives and then for the so-called pax
liberalis. A contempt for the local is, moreover, something shared by
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 147

contemporary figures of other countries, like Argentina. Free trade

would be converted before long into a love of all things foreign and
the oligarchic substrata would begin to be differentiated as pro-US,
pro-British or pro-German, or as pro-Chilean, pro-Argentine or
pro-Peruvian. There is no doubt that the founder of this manner of
thinking, which is like a desire to disappear, is Aniceto Arce.
In all this we see how a class ideology is instituted. It is con­
structed by otherwise cultured and sensible men like Moreno and
even Baptista, and by utterly practical men like Melgarejo and Arce.
In any case, it is in the figure of Pando, in his transfiguration from
the federal leader of the masses and defender of the territory into the
architect of a strategic covenant and concrete author of Willkas assas­
sination, where the final fate of the Federal Revolution is revealed,
as we shall see below.
*

It is somewhat arbitrary, but also useful, to locate the beginning of

the quinquennium of the great general crisis that would put into
question the political, regional, ethnic and economic contents that
had defined the Bolivian formation for at least the previous 40 years
on 6 May 1896.
Groups of Aymara Indians began on that day to gather in La Ceja
and El Alto and other towns surrounding the city of La Paz.
The urban population, restless and disconcerted, trembled
with fright. The authorities enquired into the purpose of the
masses. The peasants wanted only to congratulate Pando.
The army reacted and dispersed the rioters. Prisoners were
taken. The liberal candidate was held responsible for insti­
gating disorder and unrest.47
In a typical conservative election, fraudulent and fixed, Pando
lost to Fernández Alonso. ‘For the first time in Bolivia, the electoral

47 Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 58.

148 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

question is tied up with the social question,48 Baptista said then,

although he could not have fully understood then the truth of what
he said because things had only begun to unfold. Nor could Pando
or Fernández Alonso, of course, who would be the visible actors of a
tragedy of great masses. And so, just as an almost absolute reorgani­
zation of civil society was attempted (for this meant an inversion of
the terms of the agrarian regime and the consolidation of the new
supremacy of big mining firms over traditional manufacturers), that
is, when it needed most to prove its unassailability and preponder­
ance over it (over civil society), the political state, called to execute
tasks that were entirely beyond its means, revealed its vulnerability,
the form of its non-contemporaneity. To this we could add the
decline of the new surplus, but only as an ancillary factor. It is in
moments of crisis that a state reveals what it has accumulated as state
capital, and the terms of its relation to civil society, that is, to its own
cause or origin.
Heated from the beginning, the controversy revolved around the
constitutional legitimacy of the government and the location of the
capital, that is, the legitimacy and unity of the hegemonic axis,
because at least in theory, the one—the capital—had to coincide with
the other, the hegemonic axis. On this point we could say that a state
relies more on symbols (and the capital is a symbol) when its unity
is guaranteed largely by a decision or an explicit pact and less if its
unity is the result of a slow, consensual and democratic process. In
other words, if unity really exists, it matters little if parliament meets
here one day and there another or where the emblem or insignia of
that unity is located.
In claiming Sucre as the capital, Chuquisaca invoked the claim
of having been the seat of the colonial government. In other words,
to resolve something extremely urgent, it cited two events that

48 Cited in Leopoldo Zea, Dos etapas del pensamiento en Hispanoamérica:

Del romanticismo al positivismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1949),
p. 257.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 149

belonged irremediably to the past: the bureaucratic unification

whose support or definition came from its colonial ties and, on the
other hand, the second silver boom located in the south that had
already begun its decline. It invoked, in other words, the last days of
the colony*9 when the brutal realities of the present spoke of another
time. Chuquisaca, therefore, was not Piamonte.
To compensate for the hegemonic deficiency that ensued at least
in some measure from the custom of electoral fraud, practised con­
sistently since Pacheco and Arce, that is, in the middle of the transi­
tion from a non-verifiable formation to rational-verifiable formation
of power, when its prestige was in question because even the surplus
was dwindling and when nobody had agreed to give Chuquisaca
something that it had assumed as a given (its status as capital),
Fernández Alonso pitched himself against his adversaries with sheer
military force in the name of Chuquisaca, for arms to resolve what
politics could not. But Chuquisaca was not Prussia.
Ultimately, the general uprising of the Indians in the midst of
the Civil War was about to throw everyone and everything over­
board: Chuquisaca and La Paz, whites and those who could count as
white [blancoides], victors and vanquished, all spheres of the official
country. The fact is that precariousness and confusion cannot build
up from above without society itself taking on the task of filling in
the holes and here everything was suspended in a state of uncertainty.
And uncertainty is intolerable in politics. Uncertainty as to the ter­
ritorial axis; uncertainty as to the composition of power or legiti­
macy; finally, uncertainty as to the effective social and military
supremacy of the old ruling caste itself.
The tipping point was reached with the Ley de Radicatoria that
declared that Sucre or Chuquisaca would be the permanent seat of
the executive. The previous practice, which speaks to the volatility
of the situation, was that the government would convene in any49

49 The reference is to Gabriel René Moreno, Últimos días coloniales en el Alto

Perú (La Paz: Juventud, 1970).
150 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

major city of the republic; it was a system of a migrating capital. The

representatives of the north, that is, La Paz, opposed the law. Drawing
on the demographic and economic strength of the region, which was
nothing new in itself but now expressed a new balance of forces, La
Paz swiftly organized a military force equal in size and might to the
‘national* army itself. La Paz alone, solely on the strength of this mili­
tia, might have defeated Chuquisaca. La Pazs victory, however, would
have to come from its alliance with the indigenous insurrection,
essentially Aymara. This is in every respect one of the richest and
most symbolic insurrectionary movements of Latin America.
No one knows how Pando obtained a certain measure of sup­
port, popularity and respect among the Indians. Before the events
themselves, he was already called tata Pando, which proves a certain
initial charismatic relation; but it also means that nothing happens
in Bolivia without the participation of the Indians. The electoral sys­
tem was designed to exclude the Indians and indeed to prevent soci­
ety from appearing except in a particular predetermined context.
The singular resonance of Pandos name indicates, however, that the
disenfranchised regarded the elections with a certain interest and
exerted some influence in them, if only by giving them a certain
inflection. Pandos tone was effectively popular and Fernández
Alonsos was seigneurial. We could speak here of an external partic­
ipation in the electoral sphere and, conversely, it is quite clear that
the previous elections had had effects that were registered within the
collective life of the Indians despite their disenfranchisement. In any
case, the horrified reaction of the city and of the troops before a
merely symbolic demonstration like that of El Alto in May 1896,
which, moreover, consisted of no more than 2,000 people, as later
became known, is telling. It was not just the memory of Katari or of
independence, which the descendants of Seguróla surely kept, but
perhaps even more than this—perhaps a memory of the conquest
itself. In any case, there was an internalized fear. The stunned terror
of any Indian multitude is perhaps the most ancestral impulse of the
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 151

sectors that identify as non-indigenous in Bolivia. We could take this

a step further to say that just as there is a collective obscuration of
the independence of the state or the impersonality of the law, for
example, to impede the constitution of the multitude by the Indians
is a resolute and non-negotiable objective of a whole society built on
their backs. Pando, in his deep cunning, used this feeling against
Chuquisaca, perhaps because the cultural formation of La Paz as a
city is less remote from the Indians than the culture of the
Chuquisacan elite; but it was also mobilized by the Indians them­
selves, this time against Pando and La Paz.
The general revolt of the Indians is the direct result of the
seigneurial reconstruction of the land tenure regime initiated by
Melgarejo. The military uprising is not surprising if we consider the
experiences of the preceding period. Indeed, a sombre, simmering
agitation could be detected in the countryside. A La Paz newspaper
described the situation in 1896 thus:
In a relatively short space of time, indigenous groups have
committed an interminable series of abuses and transgres­
sions: the comunarios of Calamarca have set fire to Vilaque;
those of Pucarani have repeatedly raided the property of
Mr Tamayo, despite having been cleared out twice by the
Murillo Battalion; those of Yaco have refused to pay the
indigenous tribute, the colonos of Mr Goytia rise up inter­
minably; those of Aigachi and Chililaya persist in continual
skirmishes; those of Collana and Colquencha are extermi­
nating one another; those of Desaguadero engaged in repug­
nant acts of cannibalism and, finally, most of them have
perpetrated in recent years a hundred attacks on the prop­
erty and lives of persons.50
The description gives us a fairly exhaustive picture of the times.
Such abuses’ on the part of men as oppressed as these, that they ‘rise
up interminably’, could only be the prelude to rebellion, to the

50 Cited in Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 58.

152 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

jacquerie. That the comunarios of Calamarca set fire to Vilaque

reveals the growing antagonism between peasants and townspeople,
because the residents of the town were like the agents of the small
hacienda. That those of Pucarani stormed Tamayos lands was logical
because Tamayo, who had collaborated with Melgarejo, surely
acquired them through the dispossessions enacted by the latter. To
refuse to pay the indigenous tribute, as those of Yaco did, is natural
because, as we have explained, it was a tax on individuals qua Indi­
ans, a racial tribute. The constant sabotage of the telegraph lines com­
mitted by those of Tambillo was an act of sabotage against the state,
but it was also a kind of training in guerrilla tactics that, as we shall
see, would turn out to be useful. Such was the situation.
The active discontent of the Indians was a direct response to the
appropriation of communal lands that took place between 1868 and
1871, in its first phase, and then between 1874 and 1899. For these
reasons and various others, among them the conceptualization of the
territory, Melgarejo would be one of the founders of this process with
the decree o f consolidation (which is a joke) of the property of the
comunarios in 60 days, a policy resumed with the Law of Disentail-
ment of 1874. The reaction was formidable from the beginning. That
of 1868, according to a credible account, assumed the proportions
of a general uprising’:
The narration of these battles offers scenes worthy of the
conquest according to a source from the period. It is said,
for example, that General Leonardo Antezana, ‘Melgarejo’s
ferocious assassin [ . . . ] killed approximately 600 Indians
in San Pedro’ on the 28 June 1869. On the other hand,
‘between the 2nd and the 5th of January 1870, the same
Antezana once again took the lives of hundreds of people
[400] in Huaicho.’ According to Sanjin^s Uriarte, the incur­
sions of the army in Huaicho, Ancoraime, and Taraco left a
total of 2,000 Indians dead.51

51 Ibid., p. 44.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 153

This is the story of agrarian property in Bolivia. It would con­

tinue unchanged with Montes and would last until 1952.
*

It is no exaggeration to say that the features of this social-military

movement are extraordinary.
Zarate himself, the Fearsome Willka, is from Sicasica. Specifi­
cally, from Imila Imilla, a village immediately bordering Sicasica, the
land of Tupac Katari, a fact of which Zarate could not have been
unaware. The birthplace of the originary impulse of the movement
is located in Omasuyos, Pacajes, Sicasica and Inquisivi, that is, in
what Condarco called the frontier of the expanding seigneurial
agrarian regime in the reconstruction of the oligarchy.
The epithet ‘Fearsome’ comes from his white enemies, the
Chiquisacans, who perceived him as such. ‘Willka’, meanwhile, a tra­
ditional title, designates the hereditary nature of his rank, a legacy
with a long history just like the war in question. It is a millenarian
movement operating within the specific conditions of the regional
and class war of the Bolivian formation of the late nineteenth-
century. It is an intervention in ‘national’ events that could not have
been expected to be thus received. Zarate, then, is the unexpected. It
is already significant that it was a Zarate (which does not mean that
he was mestizo by blood) who called for ‘the extermination of this race
[the white race] and the constitution of an indigenous government’.52
We will return to this, which is surely a reverberation of Apaza’s
implacable maximalism. It is a collective validation of a hereditary
symbolic charisma, of liturgico-military leadership. This is radically
different from the Upper Peruvian conception of power in which the
highly personalized individual struggle for power is one of the pri­
mary objectives of life. In that case, it is not a question of ruling in
general but of ruling in one’s own name; every hidalgo in Bolivia,
rich or poor, strives for this. We might say that the infallible convic­
tions of the seigneurial Bolivian are his unquestioned superiority

52 Ibid., p. 276.
154 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

over the Indian and his traditional and personal right to power. The
Willka idea of power, in contrast, refers to a transpersonal assump­
tion of command; the impersonality of power is what guarantees its
perpetuity. The caudillos assume the position of Willka, that is, of
leadership, and incorporate the title into their being; the family is the
ayllu and the country is the final expansion of the ayllu.
There is, in fact, a first Willka, one who resisted Melgarejos bar­
baric decree against the communities in 1866. This Willkas mother,
a ‘revered and stately’ nonagenarian, was savagely murdered by
Leonardo Antezana, Melgarejo’s cousin. It was also a Willka who led
that infernal pursuit of the Melgarejists, charging across the wilder­
ness towards Peru. In the Federal Revolution itself, finally, there are
at least three successive Willkas, although there is no doubt that
Zárate is the Fearsome. The function of the title is similar to that of
Caesar and there is certainly very little of a ‘Western flavour to it. In
any case, if ever it has been possible to speak of historical memory,
here, where Zárate is born in the same town as Apaza and a third or
fourth Willka avenges the death of the first Willkas mother, where
the same area that is pillaged under the leadership of a Willka is capa­
ble of responding with another Willka more than thirty years later,
there is no doubt that this constitutes a perfect example.
Willka is, moreover, the ‘representative of the ayllus subject to
his authority’,53 like Zapata of Anenecuilco. How official this was,
among Indians no doubt little inclined to legalistic disputes with
written documents, is something that must be confirmed by further
research. In any case, it is significant that they went to war ‘with their
own system of authorities’,54 which tells us that just as we maintain
that the productive patterns of Andean agriculture were unchanged
by the juridical form of appropriation of the surplus, we could go a
step further to say that the apparent state system (chief magistrate,
etc.) coexists, as it were, with the real state system or the furtive,

53 Ibid., p. 95.
54 Ibid., p. 348.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 155

subterranean state form. What is certain is that Willka is the caudillo

because he is the representative of the ayllus under his rule and
because he follows the Aymara structure of authority below, above,
and alongside the Bolivian state. This means that in its very existence
it is essentially separatist or separate at least in relation to the state.
His contribution to the war was great, but it was also the fulfil­
ment of a hereditary role. It is the technical, organizational, and affec­
tive continuation of ancestral practices. The problem of historical
burden or legacy is decisive here. Willka would not have been pos­
sible without Katari or the Indian combatants of the Fifteen Years
War. Nor would 1952, as we shall see, have happened without Willka.
Social classes and men believe that they make history, when in reality
they repeat it unconsciously, but transforming it. Just as the miners
were the heirs of the forastero, the ccajcha, and the mita, the peasant
struggle is no doubt interpellated by the old mobilizations of the
communities and the ayllus. The same can be said, of course, of the
oligarchic legacy.
*

It is worth pausing to consider the operative description of the

war, which has a clear overtone of originality and creativity of a pop­
ular sort. We might say that the Aymara expropriate the war, that
they occupy not only their own space, claiming hegemonic com­
mand of the scene, but also condition the non-indigenous space by
immobilizing it, and even occupy the military actions themselves by
imposing a tempo. The initiative in the end is almost entirely theirs.
The horizon becomes kolla. We speak of the Aymara columns, the
Aymara army, Aymara logistics, Aymara intelligence, the Aymara
multitude, even the characteristic noise of the Aymara, and there is,
in short, an Aymara conversion of historical memory and of geo­
graphical and territorial features into military assets. This is consis­
tent with the account found in the diary of the drum major Vargas.55

55 Santos Vargas, Diario de un comandante de la independencia americana.

156 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

For example, at Crucero: ‘From the moment Colonel Pando

arrived at the head of the Murillo squad, he had time enough to
reflect, prepare, and execute actions, conveniently protected by the
thick indigenous “wall”, to then command his frontline*56
Not just to defeat Pando but to reach him, this wall had to
be crossed. Or, rather, there is a wall between Paceños and Chuqui-
sacans but it is a wall that protects the former; it is not neutral.
On the other hand, the logistical monopoly: ‘His first and most
important contribution to the victory [of La Paz] was the war of
resources against the general headquarters of Viacha [those of the
Chuquisacans].’57
Of course it was idiocy to base the encampment in the social
heart of the enemy without any prior logistical connection. Mean­
while, a conscious use of psychological resources emerges, namely,
the insinuation that something terrible that had happened in the past
could suddenly happen again, here and now. The deer-like fear of
the Indian siege emerges as a military weapon: ‘The Indians com­
pletely surrounded the regular forces of both sides’,58 which proves
that the regularity of these armies was tenuous and, moreover, that
each side was disloyal in its own way.
Meanwhile, Pandos decision to admit an important ‘sociological’
fact—that the Indians would not fight except under the command
of Indians—was extremely significant. Condarco writes that the
Indians ‘did not recognize any authority but that of their traditional
military leadership’.59
A pragmatic act if ever there was one because in the negative cor­
relation of the terms of the social equation in Bolivia, and this is evi­
dent in the Chaco War, the troops only prevailed when they assumed

56 Condarco Morales, Zirate, el temible Willka, p. 335.

57 Ibid., p. 208.
58 Ibid., p. 209.
59 Ibid., p. 208.
 I
THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 157

or were granted some level of autonomy in their operations. The

problem of military legitimacy at the moment of battle is something
that never even crossed the minds the Bolivian officers. When Pando
decided not to recognize the ‘traditional military authorities’, he was
almost defeated himself and in any case he had to fight ruthlessly, in
hand-to-hand combat, against those who had secured his victory.
The methods of combat betrayed a complete tactical and tech­
nical inferiority, and a no less marked strategic and social superiority,
namely:
First principle: ‘Attacks targeting the scattered and isolated
supply companies detached and at some distance from the
area of operations’
Second principle: Manoeuvres surrounding all enemy forces.
Third principle: Approach and attack, forcing the enemy to
‘engage in hand-to-hand combat, with machetes rather than
firearms’.
Fourth principle: ‘Decisive and overwhelming offensives
against the weakest enemy units*
Fifth principle: Continuous struggle and tenacious pursuit.60
The Indians also took advantage of the old obsession with their
numbers, with a clear understanding of the myth that the vanquished
had instilled within the victor, that is, given that the factions had no
knowledge of the dimensions of their enemy, the latter could exploit
the baseless assumption of the numerical superiority of the Indians
in every situation. According to Jauregui Rosquellas, who offers what
is perhaps the best chronicle of the events of his own faction, towards
8 January, ‘the number of insurgents reached 40,000 just in the vicin­
ity of La Paz’.61 In reality, there were no more than 4,000 or 5,000.

60 Ibid., p. 208-9.
61 Alfredo Jáuregui Rosquellas, La ciudad de los cuatro nombres, cronicario
histórico (Sucre: Imprenta La Glorieta, 1924), p. 302. Cited in Condarco
Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 208-9.
i

r
• RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

The foundation of all this was a mastery of the terrain that trans­
lated into a military advantage. Thus, to say that a great number of
Indians stretched out in a chain along the Andean routes and
guarded the main roads’62 reveals the strategic use of a constant
presence or continuous struggle because there could be Paceño or
Chuquisacan whites in one place or another, but there could never
not be Aymara Indians. This produced a sense of insecurity and
uncertainty in the former and a sense of perseverance in the Indian
combatants. The peasant transformed his weakness—his dispersion
—into a perpetual erosion of all others forces.
The endless siege of contiguity in space and time, identification
through noise, that is, the calls of the blowing horn and japapeos
(oqueos), and a symbolic presence in the elements: ‘The dense clouds
of dust kicked up by the Indian hordes’.63 Thus it was not entirely true
that ‘the only arms used by the Indians were slings [huarakas], clubs
[macanas], pikes and no more than one gun for every 20 men’.64
The application of these tactics produced a situation of general
war that involved the entire population and all the resources offered
by the environment. Such a total mobilization (which nonetheless
would have its own internal contradictions) has three necessary con­
ditions: first, the existence of an identity that is not just communal
[comunaria] but ethnic in its millenarian expression; second, there
must be a plan, and this means also recognized leadership and orga­
nized masses; third, the war must continuously expand because its
prolongation in the previous terms would make it into regular war,
which is the terrain of the karas.65
The basis of this insurrection, like that of any other, because this
is something like a law of the revolutionary event, is the effective and

62 Bias Lanza, cited in Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 255.

63 Condarco Morales, Zirate, el temible Willka, p. 215.
64 Ibid., p. 217.
65 [Whites.]
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 159

not just formal division of the ruling class. In the subformation of La

Paz, as we shall see, in part as the mode of being of Bolivian society
and in part as a result of the outward flight from the nuclei of the old
Potosí market, it was more or less to be expected that a staunch
alliance would be forged between the two anti-Chuquisacan parties
as in fact occurred here, and indeed, ‘particularism [ . . . ] went hand
in hand with a sense of community since both reflected the condi­
tions of locally rooted lordship’, which means that, in a fit of localist
passion, the initial impromptu thought of the gentlemen of La Paz
was better the Aymara than the southerners: ‘The names of Pando
and Willka went hand in hand.’66
This clearly attests to a great resolve on the part of the emergent
oligarchy of La Paz. The Chuquisacans did not respond by mobilizing
the Indians of the south because, among other reasons, they would
not have been able to do so nor would it have been in their interest.
It is remarkable how they perceived this gesture of the Paceños,
which seemed artful to the point of disgust, as an act of treason
against Bolivia. ‘They resorted to the terrible and abhorrent extreme
of rousing the indigenous race.’67 This explains how Zárate could
have reached the rank of Major General of the Federal Army. On the
other hand, that the Aymara presence was readily accepted by the
Paceños, naturally and even with a certain enthusiasm, is evident,
for example, in the reference to ‘Major Sargent Manuel Arancibia’
as ‘leader of the aboriginal vanguard’. It was, therefore, something
official.
Pando, however, spoilt the audaciousness of the gesture—of the
Aymara mobilization—with the absurd idea that they would act as
his Indians or that a man like Zárate could be definitively bought
with trifles like a generalship.

66 Ibid., p. 325.
67 Napoleón Fernández Antezana, La hecatombe de Mohoza (La Paz:
Tipografía de La Unión, 1905), p. 26. Also cited in Condarco Morales, Zárate,
el temible Willka, p. 172.
160 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

The Paceños not only benefitted from the aboriginal vanguard*

but also, as Soria Galvarro said with a measure of bitterness, Pando
‘found himself conveniently supplied by the Indians with accurate
intelligence’68 This means only that while the state project of La Paz,
in its most embryonic form, had some remote hegemonic resonance
among the Indians (a substantial part of the nation as a whole), the
Chuquisacans still had no such recognition at all and their situation
was no different from what it would have been in a Chilean territory
occupied by Chileans. This is the height of the alliance between the
regionalist uprising of the Paceña oligarchy and the millenarian
movement of the Fearsome Willka.
From then on the situation began to reveal its own contradic­
tions, its necessary enigma. In short, no one knew to what point the
intrepid and sinister general multitude of the Aymara race effectively
played that ancillary role of threat and omen, of informant, or of
exhausting the enemy, and to what point it had its own designs. In
other words, no one knew to what extent they were defending the
Paceños and La Paz itself and to what extent they were laying siege
to the city. Tt was impossible to know “what was happening in La
Paz” as a result of the Indian wall that encircled it.’69
The city was therefore held hostage by the very forces that
represented its only true line of defence. ‘[T]he Indians having
become the primary political factor’,70 then, the utter confusion of
not knowing whether it represented a threat or offered protection
escalated to a critical level as the Paceños were alarmed by the very
manner in which they were defeating the enemy. Suddenly, the dan­
ger was the imminent extermination of the Chuquisacans.

68 Rodolfo Soria Galvarro, Los últimos días del gobierno Alonso: Reportage
para la historia (Valparaíso: Universo de Gmo. Helfmann, 1899), p. 72.
69 Jáuregui Rosquellas, La ciudad de los cuatro nombres, p. 302. Cited in
Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temble Willka, p. 196.
70 Cited in Condarco Morales, Zárate, el temble Willka, p. 258.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 161

Colonel Pando, as Ismael Montes recounted, ordered the imme­

diate advance on the cavalry with the end of pursuing the fleeing
[Chuquisacans], mostly to protect them from the Indians’.71
This image of Montes, that of the ‘fleeing cavalry’, is one of a class
on its way out, a metaphor he composed unwittingly. Pando himself,
by then a man who knew the remote regions and the soul of the
peoples of the interior, could no longer discern whether he was
fighting with the Indians against the Chuquisacans or to save the
Chuquisacans for the inevitable struggle against the Indians. A ques­
tion, surely, that warrants some thought. The relations between
Pando, Willka and the Chuquisacans is worth recapitulating. In any
case, the masses can never be roused without consequences. Pando
drowned in his own overwhelming success.
In the first place, Pando accepted the conjunction of his name
and Willkas. What’s more: he decided upon this conjunction. It is a
fact that, at this point, Pando had counted Willka as an accomplice,
as a military comrade and political ally. Willkas very presence at his
side at the prefecture of Oruro, in an act that was significant given
the circumstances, was no accident but ‘a result of his unscrupulous
cunning’.72
But suddenly things came to have two meanings and just as they
didn’t know whether to kill or rescue the Chuquisacans, if La Paz
was protected by the Indians or besieged, they sensed what was hap­
pening beneath these unresolved tensions. In other words, indeed in
those of Pando himself: ‘The Indian mob began, of its own initiative,
a war of extermination against the white race.’73
Montes, who would later prove so knowledgeable about their
‘particular motives’, depicted the situation in a distorted but revealing
way: the ‘Indian hordes’, for ‘particular motives’ and in the interest

71 Ibid, p. 226.
72 Ibid., p. 138.
73 Cited in Sergio Almaraz, El podery la caidat p. 79.
162 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

of self-preservation, ‘took an interest in the conflict and then pro­

ceeded to make war of their own accord’.74
In any case, the horrific nature that the conflict assumed, espe­
cially after the massacres of Ayoayo, Umala and Mohoza, produced
a kind of understandable solidarity between the warring armies of
whites and mestizos, that is, a kind of solidarity against what they
perceived to be a common enemy. It is instructive that Pando,
Montes and Saavedra, the three major Paceña figures of the liberal-
republican era, coincided in their line of reasoning on this. Saavedra,
for example, thought that it was a long-hatched plan: ‘Willka medi­
tated the insurrection of the Aymara race of the Republic.’75
Pando, meanwhile, suggested that a race war had been latent in
the country and that the obstinacy of the Chuquisacans had
unleashed it: ‘To these [the evils of the war] we can add an inevitable
war of the races, which is already upon us by the initiative of the
indigenous race itself.’76
Fernández Alonso’s comment was already a lament: ‘Bolivia will
be engulfed’, bu r united forces’ will be hard-pressed ‘to subdue it [the
Indian horde]’.77
We have come to the critical moment of the event. It could
hardly have been expressed more clearly: here not only the facts but
even the explicit terms of their discourse indicate the existence of
two countries and not one. There is the Bolivia of Fernández Alonso
and Pando, and the Indian patria, that of Willka. There is no doubt,
therefore, that what was at stake was the inauguration o f ‘Willka as
the president of the Indian nation’.
Let us now turn to the programmatic points of Willka’s party, in
their strictest enunciation. Considered from a distance, they were in
reality quite simple:

74 Cited in Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 173.

75 Cited in ibid., p. 275.
76 Cited in ibid., p. 295.
77 Cited in ibid., p. 295.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 163

1. The restitution of aboriginal lands or conversion of the

estates into communities.
2. The subordination of the ruling castes to the aboriginal
nationalities (the terms are Condarco’s).
3. The constitution of an indigenous government.
4. The non-recognition of Pandos authority and of that of
the other revolutionary leaders.
5. ‘Obedience and fealty to Willka Zarate.’
6. The prohibition of garments not made from of tradi­
tional homespun cloth (the bayeta).78
It is quite clear, then, that all power was to be in the hands of
Zarate and the Indians. The real problem was not, however, that
Willka himself would advance this programme or even a more rad­
ical one, but that it was what was already in the souls of the people,
what many thought even before Zarate put it into words. Such was
the nature of this peace.
On the ‘sorrowful night’ of Mohoza (the brutal massacre of 120
whites), when the leaders of Pandos squadron, the elite troops of the
Federalists, decided to return to the town, the news was conveyed
(by [Commanding Officer Arturo] Eguino to [Father Jacinto] Escobar,
surnames that would later be tragically repeated): ‘Father, we are lost;
the Indian multitude has been roused; the war is no longer between
parties, but between races: we cheered Pando and the Federation,
and they answered, Long live Villca!’79
And, likewise, when they were approached by some 300 men in
Coato, near Mohaza: ‘Here there is no Pando but only Villca.’80 What
would Pando have thought then! He had unleashed something that
he could never have imagined. In a Bonapartist gesture, because such
was his inclination, he voted in favour of the law that made Sucre the

78 Ibid., p. 296.
79 Fernández Antezana, La hecatombe de Mohoza, p. 61.
80 Saavedra, ‘Proceso Mohoza’, p. 129.
164 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

de jure and de facto capital, with the argument that although he was
a native of La Paz, he was a senator for Sucre. All of La Paz rose up
in support of Pando, even as they voted against his proposal. In sum:
he could not win the war without the Indians; he had to fight for the
lives of the Chuquisacans against the Indians themselves; he ordered
the death of the very man who was the symbol and instrument of his
victory; and, in the end, he died in Kenko at the hands of Paceño
whites perhaps because they suspected, even after Willkas death, that
he was an accomplice of the Indians. A strange fate for a man forever
adrift amid of the forces of history.
Let us see, then, what was contained within the millenarian
ideologeme of the patria india.
*

The history of Zarate and its premises bring us back to the beginning
of this excursus. The logic of reduction or sacrifice appears as a path
that must be followed before a central thought-concrete that is also,
within the logic of Marxism, a concrete appropriation or subordina­
tion of the captured object, can be obtained. It seems that history,
which is something like the longue durée of politics, is the proof that
the object of appropriation exists as such. And yet it also seems that
this does not confer knowledge as the conscious organization of what
has been appropriated if that particular class of subjects or determi­
nants of the era that are the concrete forms of totalization is not pro­
duced. It’s true that the original picture of the system of production
and consumption as a circular process’81 or the formation of a com­
mon foundation or even of the ‘historical foundation pose the ques­
tion of what constitutes the effective nucleus of the interpellative call.
That is to say, of interpellation and totalization when these exist. It is
clear, therefore, that there can be no totalization without reduction

81 Piero Sraffa, in reference to Quesnay’s Tableau économique. See Sraffa,

Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of
Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 93.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 165

or sacrifice; that totalities are merely nominal before the acquisition

of their historical personality but also that this, the real sequence, is
not intelligible if there is no passage from apparent subjects to the
universal subjects that are totalities. We maintain that we can speak
of this only when it has occurred, although of course it is not impos­
sible to detect other perhaps equally rich moments—for example,
the phase of flux or incomplete definition of the conditions that pre­
cede totalization, that is, the forms of general equivalence not in a
merely economic sense and even instances of capitulation or frag­
mentation of a process of incomplete totalization.
If we speak of the Bolivian in situ we must say that interaction
or recognition as reciprocity, considered both in terms of the markets
and further back, from its agrarian foundation, has given rise to a
kind of Geist or aura. Nonetheless, the politico-spatial dissolution
that followed Amarus campaign continued with the decline of the
general equivalent itself that had been produced by Potosí and that
ultimately was Potosí (since Potosí is all there was of identification
between Tucumán and Puno, or between Arequipa, Santa Cruz, and
Córdoba) as a result of the collapse of the first silver boom, and then,
at the superstructural level, with the de jure and de facto disappear­
ance of the Audiencia of Charcas, a court ‘much given to political
intrusions in the business of government’82 that had played the part
of the patron, guard and architect of a routine-bureaucratic unifica­
tion like that imparted by Lima to Peru. Ultimately, the substitution
of the monopolistic system of the interior centres and of mining by
the more contemporary idea of ports, modern textiles and free trade
was no more than the inevitable result of the failure of a precarious,
contingent unification.
The loss of the authoritarian effectivity of the Audiencia, whose
legitimacy was indisputable even if only as a result of the reproduc­
tion of its juridical apparatus over three centuries of power, inevitably
made itself felt among these men—so accustomed to power coming

82 Moreno, Últimos días coloniales en el Alto Perú, p. 207.

166 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

from above and from without to the intermittent and aleatory forms
of rule—by way of the pronouncements of the caudillos, barbaric or
not, who responded to fortuitous forms of determination that came
from a base that now had no surviving articulation between its parts
except the aura that remained from the habit of coexistence.
The caudillos are, however, only an expression of the gamonal-
ization of power, that is, the latifundium as the horizon of visibility
once the traditional spatial links of the Potosí market and even of the
crushing juridical authority of Charcas had been destroyed or weak­
ened. A book like Últimos días coloniales en el Alto Perú [The Last
Days of the Colonial Era in Upper Peru] reveals the point to which
this, the colonial subcentres and subcultures, certainly not without
their own charms and provincial patriotism, contained second-hand
cultural and political frameworks of a closed, localist kind, like
Chuquisaca: ‘a ceremonious, contentious, and false court*,83 which
included the doctors, a class of that instinct no less rationalist than
idle, which always trained its members in colonial society to under­
stand and consult and lead, and whose members on more than one
occasion had shown a proud esprit de corps’.84
The motley composition of the colonial, interrupted only by the
continual crises that surfaced with such terrifying force with Katari,
the Fifteen Days’ War, Belzu, and Willka, was therefore like an omen
of the inevitable splintering of a certain mutilated unification that
had lost its fetishistic and seductive power.
In politics in general, and even more so in what we might call
structural politics (as opposed to what is known as superstructural
politics), unresolved questions weigh so heavily that they impede the
functioning of the whole relation. The moveable capital was like a
symbol of this dissociation because it was obvious that it represented
a decision continually deferred. Later came what we might call the
second spatial question, with the lack of effective legitimacy in a

83 Ibid., p. 140.
84 Ibid., p. 297.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 167

legitimate territory such as Cobija. Finally, the challenge posed to

Chuquisaca by La Paz. The process reached its culmination only with
the Willka insurrection. It would last another several decades but
really it is then that it became clear that there was little left for the
oligarchy as a bloc to do.
There is no doubt that events were putting the national question
on the table as a problem that knit together all other problems. And
so we must consider this issue in its general context, in an analysis
focused on Bolivia.

Marx wrote that ‘The community itself appears as the First great force
of production.’85 The form of socialization or of the collective is
something that has always been of great importance and we have
always known that some forms are more effective than others, at least
in relation to certain ends. The problem of the optimum itself, which
we addressed in the previous chapter, in fact has to do with this. The
nation, for example, is a specific form of civil existence and associa­
tion, but not every civil society is a nation. In principle, therefore,
this tells us only that there are homogeneous men who share a single
identity. In other words, it would seem to be a problem belonging to
the value sphere, as Weber would have it: the nation exists where men
feel themselves to be a nation. It is understandable, of course, that it
is thought logical that homogeneous men produce a unified political
will more readily or that the will of the state is expanded and fulfilled
more efficiently, more directly, in a civil society that receives it with
homogeneous forms, forms that respond in a similar way to the same
incitement. But things are surely more contradictory and compli­
cated than this because what we might call the depth or density of
the constitution of a nation is of no small importance, nor is the cer­
tainty or penetration of the state, because a state can have at its dis­
posal forms that are very advanced but alien to its society, etc.

85 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 495.

168 • RENfi ZAVALETA MERCADO

In essence, the question can be summed up as follows: We can

hardly speak of capitalism in the strict sense except with the general
dissemination of the market or what has been called the generaliza­
tion of market relations. We might say that the general market is a
feature of the capitalist mode of production along with, for example,
expanded reproduction and free men. It is truly a crucial attribute
and before this we can speak only in terms of a higher or lower phase
of originary accumulation, that is, of the prehistory of capital. This
means that one always produces for another and never for himself.
This implies, first of all, the suppression of the logic of the village
and domestic production.
Things are in themselves external to man, and therefore
alienable. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it
is only necessary for men to agree tacitly to treat each other
as private owners of those alienable things, and, precisely for
that reason, as persons who are independent of each other.
But this relationship of reciprocal isolation and foreignness
does not exist for the members of a primitive community of
natural origin, whether it takes the form of a patriarchal
family, an ancient Indian commune or an Inca state. The
exchange of commodities begins where communities have
their boundaries [ . . . ]86
There are a number of crucial points here: In the first place, it is
not a matter of free men in general or in isolation but of men who
recognize one another as such (they ‘must therefore, recognize each
other as owners’87). Second, and most importantly, where the state of
separation or independence has not been produced, the community
or collective ground is also false, that is, mechanical and not organic
as it must be in the national reconstruction of capitalism.
It is, therefore, not interaction in general but the interaction of
free men who recognize one another as such. This is something that

86 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 182. [Zavaletas emphasis.]

87 Ibid., p. 178.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 169

cannot occur without consequences. It gives rise, therefore, to a type

of subjectification (to be distinguished from subjectivity because here
subjects are constituted) at once determined and determinant in rela­
tion to the immediate other. It is to this generalized interaction or
intersubjectivity, which is the effect of total circulation upon subjects,
to which we must attribute the construction of the great modern
forms of totalization, from the social class (which does not resemble
any social class from any prior era) to the multitude or the masses
themselves, from the nation to the state. In their interpenetration,
individuals produce social substance: ‘the independence of the indi­
viduals from each other has as its counterpart and supplement a sys­
tem of all-round material dependence’.88 And also:
The social character of activity, as well as the social form of
the product, and the share of individuals in production here
appear as something alien and objective, confronting the
individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their
subordination to relations which subsist independently of
them and which arise out of collisions between mutually
indifferent individuals.89
The ‘practically indestructible nature that Weber ascribes to the
rational state90 derives from this no doubt unprecedented form of
intersubjectification. It is based on the destruction or abolition of the
old individual—because one who has not been separated cannot be
united in the modern sense—and also of its environment, which is
the family and the village. The consequences of such environments
are, for example, the despotic state or non-equivalent exchange, etc.
The consciousness of the individual cannot be recovered then in
what he no longer is but only in what he is and this is not possible
without a thinking of totality. Such is the importance of this problem
in relation to our whole era.

88 Ibid., pp. 202-3.

89 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.
90 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 987.
170 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

By nation, therefore, in principle and in general, we mean the

collective self or socialized substance that is the result of the most
basic premises of capitalism. It is, therefore, a self made up of the
imaginary confluence of men in a state of detachment—alienated
men. The relation between one and the other, the national self and
the revocation of the prior communal identity or of a mechanical
and inorganic solidarity, is not merely circumstantial, but entails a
necessary causality; if the latter does not occur, the former cannot
exist: ‘The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange
values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic)
relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided depen­
dence of the producers on one another.*91
Therefore: ‘Personal independence founded on objective [sach-
licher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of
general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs
and universal capacities is formed for the first time.*92
The nation and its complex derivative, the nation state, would
then be something like the expression of this ‘universal metabolism*.
In other words, for the nation to exist, an event that involves the dis­
solution of the ‘fixed personal relations of dependence* and the emer­
gence of a transpersonal link, or at least an event that amounts to
this in its pretensions of validity, must take place. We will consider
the hypothesis of precapitalist nationalization below.
In this sense, it is composed of men who are free of themselves
for an instant (because the self contains here the prior ideological
mode of insertion) and, consequently, now indeed free men plain
and simple, facing a kind of interpellation or call, men who are sub­
sumed (real subsumption). This runs exactly parallel to the moment
of formal subsumption because subsumption indeed refers to the
subjection of labour to capital, but it designates, beyond this, the act
of internalization of a new conception of time. Men accept the

91 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 156.

92 Ibid., p. 158.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA # 171

authority that regulates their discipline and, consequently, they expe­

rience a multiplication of time. Meanwhile, just as a man who frees
himself through a confrontation with industrial capital differs from
one who frees himself from commercial capital and all this is also
contingent upon on the extent to which capital thinks of itself as
industrial, that is, with a mentality as capitalist as its own productive
acts, so also the nature of the interpellation will depend on the degree
of its externality. It is one thing for the nucleus of interpellation to
be constructed by a collective-democratic action or process, and
another for it to be received from an external constitutive moment,
to which it has contributed nothing.
Indeed, when Lenin wrote that the nation-state is the ideal
context for the development of capitalism, he was certainly adhering
to a principle that is implicit in all of Marxs works, although his
scientific contempt, like that of Marx himself, for the heterogeneous
[lo abigarrado] would later have important political consequences.
In other words: Nobody doubts that capitalist development can take
place before the nation exists in the form of its theoretical paradigm.
England itself, with its yeoman-citizen-depeasantization-Baconism-
industrialization model, is an example of how this process is not
incompatible with certain residues, sometimes of considerable pro­
portions, of noncapitalist forms. We must acknowledge, at the same
time, that a cushion of this kind is not indispensable for real sub­
sumption, that is, the application en masse of science as a general
rationality, of technology and the machine to the productive act.
There are authoritarian forms of real subsumption, like the Japanese,
which cannot be said to have coincided with intellectual reform
except within the Meiji elite, or postcapitalist forms as occurred
in the Soviet Union. All this is true. However, whether the implan­
tation of capitalism or of postcapitalist industrialization takes place
on a national stage (of prior intersubjectivity) or the degree to which
a national logic is constructed or not, the measure in which the
subsumption of science itself under production and daily life is
172 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

incorporated into the spirit of the masses, that is, the internal con­
tours of society, all this surely indicates one level or another of devel­
opment of the ‘productive force that is totalization. The sometimes
tragic force of classes and of the multitude but also of states and of
nations in our time is the manifestation of these profound social
events.
The problem, as is well known, is larger than all this. Nations, of
course, are the basis or the units of the world market, that is, the
mediations between globality and concrete labour. In a kind of dou­
ble life, however, the world system is a rival to the constitution of
nation-states and at the same time the measure of its success depends
largely on the extent to which it is capable of being internalized
within nation-states, which means obstructing their identity or
sovereignty, and this is the catch. Every nation-state, on the other
hand, is the enemy of another nation-state; no rhetoric can change
this and in this regard no one looks out for anything but ones own
interests understood as something utterly non-negotiable. This
occurs to an extreme degree in the relations between the original
nation-states and the latecomers.
The ideal internalization of the core nation-state in the periphery
is clearly demonstrable: not for nothing do we speak of the national-
popular and, on the other hand, all the peripheral ruling classes are
unconditional partisans of the logic of the world market.
We can derive from the foregoing propositions certain limita­
tions of the nation-state in the world today. It is certainly true that,
on the one hand, the privileged locus for the realization or honing of
certain productive forces like the free man and his correlate that is
impersonal power, formal subsumption as a precondition for the pri­
macy of the ideological as the memory of punishment above actual
punishment or force or the repressive apparatus, is the nation-state.
On the other hand, real subsumption itself holds little interest for us
as something devised in Galileo’s tower but only insofar as it is con­
verted, like equality, which is its premise, into a general intuition, and
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 173

it is clear that this, real subsumption, is more effective, so to speak,

in a nation or nation-state. All this is obvious. But it is no less obvious
that the nation-state, as pre-defined will and tied to a single contin­
uous body, does not exist in such purity. After the core nations, there
can only be pathetic forms of modernization of nation-states outside
of them.
The nation-state is what occurs when society has become a
nation, when the state desires in the name of the nation what the
nation wants it to desire for it. The state, certainly, can be the condi­
tion of the nation, preceding it, and this is what has almost always
occurred; but the inverse is also possible, where the nation pre-exists
the state.
*

The present discussion interests us here only insofar as it relates to

the situation in Bolivia during the general national crisis of the
Federal War. In the war itself, a set of interconnected prior events
surfaced. One such event, for example, was the inevitable rupture of
the false nationalization derived from administrative centralization
and its contingent equivalence. The silver of Potosí, in any case, was
not the same thing as the wheat of Italy because as long as Italy exists
its wheat will exist; silver, on the other hand, is something that will
run out. To continue with the comparison, Chuquisaca, which
wanted to rule but not to lead—not to contain the interests of the led
in a hegemonic fashion—did not fulfil then what has been called the
‘function of Piedmont’.93 La Paz, in turn, seemed to be a kind of
miniature Prussia in its victory over Chuquisaca but it did not
assume this role in relation to Chile (nor could it have) and so, since
its consciousness of the loss of the coast was so vague and tenuous,
there was no France to play the role of unifying incentive for
Germany. But we must ask why here all paths become tortuous along

93 Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, pp. 104-6.

174 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

the way and end in frustration and which elements of the nation have
indeed been effectively achieved in Bolivia.
It is not unprofitable to refer to Stalins definition since, although
nobody speaks in these terms today, it is still the most succinct.94 For
example, with regard to the ‘stable community, historically consti­
tuted’, what is meant here surely is that it is not simply a matter of a
racial community or of a tribal contract but refers instead to a ‘series
of significant chronological groupings’, as Pierre Vilar puts it. This is
true, but nobody can deny that the racial community (and even more
so the ethnic community) is a contributing element, favourable and
sometimes decisive in processes of nationalization. If it is an impre­
cise and evaluative category, it nonetheless belongs to the order of
powerful and primary facts. It is not necessary to claim that this
category lacks effective significance in order to fight racism. Man’s
physical externalization surely constitutes a sign that cannot be
dismissed, although of course, perhaps as a result of its very
irrefutability, it produces only an apparent identity. The force of its
manifestation stands in stark contrast to the relativity of its content.
It’s true that a deep intersubjectivity is often founded on the
supremacy of identity over heterogeneity and this is a m anner of
approach like any other. It is good, moreover, that men insist on what
they are.
It is a fact, however, that is always preliminary and rudimentary
and peoples that locate the key to their community in this are nec­
essarily primitive peoples or nonprimitive peoples that have reverted
to the primitive. Still, it is undeniable that in many cases (and this
proves that it is senseless to theorize the national independently of
historical context or particular cases) racial sympathy has constituted
a causal link in the process of national recognition. Moreover, there
is no doubt that the nature of the events incorporated determines
the national selection, and this is what we might call a constitutive

94 Stalin, Marxism and the National Question.

 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME W1LLKA • 175

moment or significant chronological grouping. Men always return

to certain profound events that serve as points of departure.
Things are more complicated when it comes to the territory,
although its function and task is no less fluid. The event of revelation
or nationalization (interpellation) is of course experienced by a living
body and a face but as important or more than this is the fact that it
occurs within a landscape or environment. The hermeneutic func­
tion of space is, however, a dependent factor because it is qualified
by what occurs within it. Some peoples (and this is the case in
Bolivia) are not intelligible outside of their space. The appropriated
existence of the space is subject to its own organizational models,
although certainly they have been determined by it originally. It is
something largely determined by agriculture and even by the type of
livestock (since neither can be practised in a spontaneous fashion)
because the harvest was of course very scant. The persistence of men
is in reality a response to the rejection of the land, which creates an
intense symbiosis.
There is nonetheless no reason why this should be any less
instrumental. In the end, our discussion of this question, in such lim­
ited terms, might seem to suggest a state of subordination to the nat­
ural and the cosmic, which would of course be an overstatement. The
optimism in the face of the cosmos shown by men like Marx is a con­
sequence the fact that they were the sons of an age in which real sub­
sumption had just occurred.
Nor is it necessary to expand on the posteriority that the terri­
tory can sometimes have vis-à-vis the nation. There is no doubt that
the Anglo-Americans, who still have no toponym of their own to
refer to themselves but who do indeed have a coherent identity,
existed first and then gave themselves their space, although it is also
true to some extent that neither Texas nor Atacama will ever be truly
American or Chilean. In any case, its clear that the raison d être of
the territory is subordinated in general to the act of articulation,
which is the essence of the national.
176 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Its true, on the other hand, as Gramsci (who was Sardinian) said,
that a language is a conception of the world. Language is also, how­
ever, a dynamic process. What we call a national language is ulti­
mately nothing but the modus vivendi between the languages or
elements that take part in the process of nationalization or, as it were,
the linguistic terms in which the pact has been instituted and, in this
case (not for nothing does Gramsci himself say that ‘the new culture
[ . . . ] was born in dialect’95), they qualify the centralizing language
or the latter is imposed through a Darwinian process of selection,
that is, through the destruction of other languages. As conceptions
of the world, languages traverse and exceed their formalization. Thus
conceived, a language should contain the subjection, oppression and
expression of the thing and its opposites, that is to say, it is a discourse
on the world. In any case, it is not a neutral social fact. If discourse
is nothing but representation, it is nothing at all: it is assumed to
morphologically absorb the social fact and it is at the same time the
programme that a society lays out for itself. The indigenous or
African inflection of the different varieties of Spanish spoken in
Bolivia and in the rest of the Americas does not constitute a mere
deficit in relation to Golden Age Spanish. It is the form of appropri­
ation of the language or the linguistic consequences of its insertion
in a new world.
The linguistic and interlinguistic elements in Bolivia serve as a
point of entry into this problematic. Not just because of the patently
Darwinian suppression of Puquina but also as a result of the tenacity
or persistence of Aymara, which is the linguistic equivalent in
its power of resistance of the communal form as conceived by
Grieshaber and others. In any case, Quechua, which is now seen by
many as an originary language, was in reality adopted as a result
of the introduction of mitima96colonies, that is, it was a cultural impo-

95 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol . 3, p. 97 (Q6 §116).

96 An Inca system of population resettlement to facilitate state military and
political control as well as economic production.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 177

sition or a typical case of negative hegemony. Forced Quechuization

was a prelude to the forced de-Quechuization attempted by [José
Antonio de] Areche. It then became one of the general languages of
Peru and Finally the lingua franca of Potosí, that is, of the alienation
determined by the market system of Potosí. This role played by the
Quechua language, which is now the most widely used in the country
with the exception of Spanish, as a conquering language, the lan­
guage imposed universally in all regions except the Cuzco Valley,
with the Incas, with colonial mining, or with the forasteros, expresses
a particular social matrix. Whether the form of nationalization
would amount here to forced Hispanicization or to the various bilin­
gual forms also depends, therefore, on the resolution of the cultural
contents of the class struggle. It would not be incorrect to maintain
that there is a ‘moral economy’ of linguistic distribution.
Nor is it necessary to dwell too much on the reductio ad absurdum
of Stalins proposition: that without a prior common language, the
French or the Italians would not have succeeded in becoming a
nation. The decisive barrier would here seem to be the lack of a dis­
tinct, previously unified language. We can challenge this by saying,
and this is undeniable, that the formation of the language is often
a concurrent part of the formation of the nation and here the role
of Dante or Luther is one thing and the popular formation of the
Spanish language is another. This has been called the ‘historical knot’:
The original defect of the new bourgeois state, which had
not known to found its constitution on the broad economic
and social base of an agrarian and peasant revolution that
would destroy, along with the landholding monopoly, a
semifeudal backwardness and not only of the Mezzogiorno.97
In other words, the logic of the junker path was inherent in the
birth of Hochdeutsch and the unification of the language was a her­
ald of events to come. A different story no doubt from that of the
successful Basque, Catalan or Galician resistance to Spanish or the

97 [From Gramsci, although the exact source cannot be traced.]

178 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

incorporation of French by the Italians of Nice or by the Basques or

the Bretons, and, in short, by all the peoples, Alsace included, in the
interlocution of the French Revolution. Under these conditions,
would not the gamonalization of the Bolivian social formation have
something to do with the fragmentation, if not of Quechua or
Aymara, of Spanish itself as it is spoken in these regions? Is it not
even to this day significant that Paraguay, a country with a consid­
erable indigenous population or where the indigenous maintains a
strong presence and without a seigneurial property regime (without
a traditional landed aristocracy de facto), developed a fluid, effortless
bilingualism while this occurred only sporadically in Mexico, Peru
and Bolivia and in Guatemala and El Salvador there was a true lin­
guistic persecution? All these, the non-bilingual countries, are coun­
tries with a predominantly servile productive model. In Bolivia,
Cochabamba, whose fundamental characteristics we will consider
below, stands out as an important exception. Here we have the begin­
nings of a project that does not come out of nowhere. It is what
proves that monolinguist or bilinguist dogmatism necessarily refers
to what is called a mass project, a democratic pact. What matters,
therefore, are the consensus of the masses, that is, the modality
adopted, spontaneously or not, by the men who take part in the act
of nationalization. In other words, what matters is the scope of inter-
subjectivity and not its linguistic form. The language is only a sign
of nationalization and not its condition. In the moment of its com­
municative intensity, a people can abandon its language since it has
been proven that peoples are capable of retreating from their vision
of the world and language is, indeed, nothing but a conception of
the world. To hold bilingualism to be a limitation or obstacle to
Paraguayan or Cochabamban identity is nonsense. Bilingualism, on
the contrary, is their identity. Where it effectively reflects a universal
sensibility of the people, it is a typical popular solution. But here we
are referring only to a certain bilingualism, that of a self-determined,
democratic identity. In other circumstances, of course, bilingualism
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA * 179

can be a form of oppression. It seems that this is how the Basques

and Catalans experience it.
With all the importance that his racial, spatial, and especially
linguistic arguments might have had, what Stalin called problems of
‘economic life’ and ‘psychology’ or the community of culture are
undoubtedly those which have the most decisive value, although they
can have only a relative meaning if we do not look back to their orig­
inary phase, that is, to the problematic of the constitutive moment.
In principle at least, both economic and psychological life would
have to do with the concept, which is more conspicuous in certain
advanced capitalist countries, of depeasantization or the Western
form of originary accumulation (the way in which originary accu­
mulation affects the agrarian culture). This, however, is rudimentary
ab origine. In the end, to speak simply of a ‘common economic life*
is idiocy. In the first place, because it’s obvious that there are non-
market forms of economic life in common. If we take a step back to
recapitulate, we could say that if the market form is decisive it is not
because things are bought and sold but because of the strength or
perfect hegemony that it acquires.
‘Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state
does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange;
it is a product of the same.’98
Given that the mercantile alter or referent is such a decisive con­
dition of the self, it should give rise to a kind of compulsive reciproc­
ity or interpenetration. This necessarily requires the factual validity
of the state of alienation, the advent of the juridically free individual,
which is a kind of economic citizenship; but also the immediate sub­
sumption under the market, that is, formal subsumption, which is a
contract between capital and labour. This same form of economic
life in common’ can occur, therefore, with a greater level of partici­
pation on the part of the alienated individual or as a fact imposed

98 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 165.

180 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

upon the individual. The level of consensus with which formal sub­
sumption takes place of course gives a distinct connotation to each
constitutive pact. It is this generalized interaction that produces the
social or national substance that can also be called value and herein
lies the material base of the national in the capitalist mode of
production.
If we agree, then, that there are different economic lives in com­
mon, we could say that on the contrary the existence of pre-market
forms of economic life in common is sometimes the most formidable
obstacle to a nationalization of the capitalist sort because it crystalizes
and preserves the precapitalist or noncapitalist nation.
In this regard, if horizontal integration is extremely important
(from the suppression of tariffs to the erection of a national market
infrastructure to the abolition of non-rational units of exchange, such
as womens currency, etc.), the aspect of vertical integration is even
more important because it relates to the democratic conceptualization
of society. Equality is unity, or at least there is no true unity except
among equals. Hence the mass base of self-determination: a people
made up of equal men tends naturally towards self-determination;
non-democratic self-determination, therefore, is founded in a mere
messianic impulse or depends on the whim of those who rule; it is
not a structural fact.
On the other hand, the composition of the total worker and of
the general capitalist cannot be external to elements like those we
have just described and are therefore results of the collective habits
originating in the market understood as universal interaction. This
is especially true with regard to the latter, the collective capitalist,
because the less private the retention of surplus value the more
national it is. In other words, its not enough for things to be national
in appearance or on the surface; the circulation of surplus value and
even the rate of the rotation of capital (because certainly the more it
circulates the more unified it is) speak to the qualitative implications
of unification. The state, ultimately, is nothing but the production of
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 181

political will (because it ‘desires in the name of the nation) in relation

to the social body. In any case, its clear that not all ‘economic lives
in common are equal nor do they all have the same effects. The deep
market develops gradually. It is what indicates beyond all doubt the
level of organization of the collectivity as productive force. A society
can persist in the same common pastoral practices and even in a cen­
tralized system of taxation with no nationalizing effects in the capi­
talist sense. On the other hand, with a sophisticated process of
rotation, it is possible for this to be achieved without a common lan­
guage or even a common psychology.
On the subject of the mercantile production of the nation, we
must make two more remarks. Fragmentary or scattered forms of
the market require that the support of the social substance—as noted
with regard to Potosí—be something durable or constant. The dis­
appearance of this support with the mercury crisis led to the disar­
ticulation of that nascent domestic market. The situation in Potosí
was volatile not only because it was a contingent and ephemeral
market but because it was founded, in terms of its base, on forced
commercialization and controlled trade. This aggravated the gamon-
alization of the economy and differentiated the regional patterns of
social development to a considerable extent, besides giving rise to a
centrifugal model of development. We might say that the social
formation experienced a regression because never before had such
dispersive tendencies been so powerfully expressed as in the inter­
regional and class struggle that arose under the common banner of
the Federal Revolution, which compares unfavourably with the
Potosí market and even with its pre-Hispanic precursor. As to the
former, it was certainly a case of what Serení calls ‘a national market
of adjacent regional markets’. " In reality, the ideological matrix
of this age or its interpenetration is the only thing that allowed
the nation to survive the clearly centrifugal and sometimes liquida-
tionist programme of the ruling classes of the republic. As to the9

99 Emilio Sereni, Capitalismo y mercado nacional (Barcelona: Crítica, 1980).

182 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

pre-Hispanic element, there had been a certain passive homogeneity,

proper to this type of accumulation, that was utterly dependent on
the cement of the state; these were statolatrous societies, so that when
the Spaniards took the apex of the system, it immediately lost its
organicity and fell back to its elemental bastions of resistance, to agri­
culture and quiet discontent.
*

The economic moment of national formation, which can also be con­

ceived as that of the passage from contingent exchange to general
exchange, and its ideological or cultural correlate, the formation of
the collective unconscious, are both founded in the vicissitudes of the
constitutive moment. A materialist conception of history must strug­
gle consciously against a misappropriation of this concept, that is,
against the cult of the primal, which would explain all of life on the
basis of protomemories or protophantasies of collective archetypes.
This, as is well known, has an ultra-reactionary derivation in Jung;
but that does not discredit the truth that ‘As the individual is not just
a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a col­
lective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must
lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to
isolation.’100 The very assumption of predestination in history leads
irremediably to an irrationalist and ultimately Darwinian conception
of the social. The myth of the finality of destiny has had no course
but this. On the other hand, it is well known that every society lives
constitutive moments of different intensities and positions in the
course of its development and that there can be moreover what we
might call a hegemonic shift or successive constitution, although this
occurs only within the logic of an advanced social optimum. This is
how democratic selection operates, with all the limitations that come
with the framework set by its class character and by the simultaneous

100 Carl Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Gerhard Adler ed., R. F. C. Hull
trans.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1966), p. 2508.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 183

production of state receptivity and a rational political will. The rev­

olutionary event itself is a cathartic and catastrophic form of amend­
ment of history and implies a process of selection by the masses in
that they constitute the social man (of our time) in practice.
If it is clear that such an originary act cannot be explained inde­
pendently of the conjuncture proper to man in a state of alienation,
it does not follow that forced depeasantization, following the English
or Stanilist model, is the only path. The ‘dissolution of all fixed per­
sonal (historic) relations of dependence’,101 as the French example
proves, does not necessarily require a social Darwinist solution. It
must be said that in this matter monist interpretations have had
disastrous results. There is a kind of positivist nihilism that arises
from this and it has come to constitute a school of thought among
scholars of the problems of development. Nonetheless, it is impossi­
ble to proceed with our discussion without a certain description of
this paradigm.
That of the English is indeed a quintessential constitutive
moment. At least it is the most familiar. There was an almost mirac­
ulous convergence of conditions that all seem post hoc to tend
towards the construction of the same thing—the English process: not
only the relative brevity of English feudalism, which certainly should
have left fewerfeudal memories than the French millennium, but also
a sequence beginning with the self-destruction of its aristocratic
source in the War of the Roses, which suppresses it in practice in the
name of an appeal to aristocratic purity, that is, that it is a young
country, having shed the burden of the old nobility; that the tradition
was pastoral, and wool tends towards industry just as winemaking
tends towards smallholding; and finally, the drastic depopulation of
the countryside with the Black Plague. But this, as we know, is impor­
tant only from the perspective of the effects of the demographic
catastrophe: the abrupt death of half the population in two years can­
not but leave lasting ideological traces. A world of representations

101 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 156.

184 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

dies with the victims and this is why unprecedented (unforeseeable)

loss of life always has such a great ideological impact. The Black
Death itself was common to the Europeans; its reception here, on the
other hand, was English because its consequences were very different
in Germany or Poland. That a man famous for elevating his sexuality
to the level of state doctrine like Henry VIII had to do with this
proves how little heroes matter in such processes. In fact, the
(belated) substitution of personal services by tribute in kind and of
the latter by centralized rent, and the shift, through the price revo­
lution, towards the constitution of free men produces at once a m od­
ernization of the myth of the (‘freeborn) Englishman, that is, the
yeoman origin of individualism, but also a multitude of ‘separated’
but famished men, the unequivocal root o f‘possessive individualism’.
All this no doubt configures a distinct constitutive moment. Here,
however, we see the inadequacy of the designation of this cycle as a
moment, although it is true that the idea of the act is not absent in
some of its features, such as the enclosures and the expulsion of the
farmers. The English structural and superstructural forms, even the
eclecticism of a primitive bourgeois revolution crowned by the polit­
ical failure of the bourgeoisie and the contractual rebirth of its enemy,
constituted the phases of development of this narrative whose secret
perhaps lies in the construction of the agrarian foundation of indus­
trialization. For Englishmen from that point on this tabula rasa, the
land before its commodification, that is, the pre-mercantile moment
of the conception of the land, is but the prehistory of agriculture.
In England, in short, the substitution of the traditional tempo­
rality of man, which was that of agriculture, occurred in this way.
Depeasantization, therefore, was the English mode of destruction of
the point of reference or scene of peasant culture, which was the cel­
lular base of all previous modes of production. Thus the first rupture
takes place between man and his traditional means of production,
which is the land, and his solitude or independence in relation to the
soil begins; this had to be accompanied by what we call juridical
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 185

equality, that ‘one pre-historical condition [that] comprises a worlds

history’.102 This is what has been called the advent of the self.
It is so brutal an event that it is almost indescribable. The state
of separation presupposes a collective state of ideological void or the
emptying of a conception of the world. The loss of the erratic logic
of the peasant or pre-national forms of reasoning (or of a rationality
internal to the peasantry) that followed could be successfully sup­
plemented by an anthropocentric worldview. In other words, where
there is no alienation, it is doubtful that intellectual reform, which is
the medium of real subsumption, will occur; without this, without a
reform of the intellect, the logic of the factory itself is but a super­
imposition. The combination of these factors constitutes an example
of the optimum or equation: ‘Whatever the British advance was
due to, it was not scientific and technological superiority. In the nat­
ural sciences the French were almost certainly ahead of the of the
British.’103
This means that while it is certainly false that Arkwright
invented the factory, it is true, on the other hand, that the idea of the
factory was brewing in the English social process and therefore
Bacon could be to philosophy what Stephenson was to the extraction
of coal—men with the same social reasoning.
The sociologists know the importance of a moment of receptiv­
ity or permeability. It is not something that happens every day and
in essence all social science is the study of significant exceptionality.
It is then that the essential call that is only part of the in terp ellate
process can be produced, the precise convocation or implantation of
the distribution or character of the social formation. This of course
will follow a particular course depending on whether the interpella­
tion is imposed by a more properly bourgeois bourgeoisie, by a

102 Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 274.

103 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York: Vintage,
1962), p. 29.
186 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

democratic revolutionary class (perhaps secretly harbouring bour­

geois desires), or by a class of despotic reformers. Any one of these
is possible.
Returning to the English example, that kind of political poverty
or infirmity of the aristocracy after the War of the Roses would cause
the aristocratic programme to remain in the hands of a false aristoc­
racy, a social placebo: the essential feudal convictions would be
irreparably dampened. This is compounded by the parallel hegemonic
incapacity of the bourgeoisie, which ‘had lost even its personality’ and
was resigned to paying a very significant lip service to the aristocracy.
In an infinite syncretism, ennoblement itself would serve the function
of bureaucratic recruitment and the selection of state personnel. The
hubris of the formation is aptly exemplified by Arkwright, who, after
inventing the factory system, bought himself a landed estate. On the
other hand, the hypothesis that if the favourable circumstances of the
environment for the passage from real subsumption to a mode of
reasoning of the masses were duly appreciated it was because of what
has been called ‘the existence of a vast proletariat’, that is, the great
number of men in a state of perplexity and displacement, is not
implausible. This of course favours democratization rather than rigid
stratification. There is, in short, a base with a powerful capitalist force
and a superstructure with undeniable feudal parameters. In the end,
neither those at the top nor those at the bottom were disinclined to
do business. The religious schism of Henry VIII itself seems to be
nothing but a secularization of religion, that is to say, Anglicanism
was the deism of the English and they would rather have their king
be also their pope than make the pope king of England. An entirely
different thing no doubt from Spain’s nationalization (so to speak)
sealed by the Reconquista, military supremacy and Catholicism
understood precisely as counterreformation, with the visible predom­
inance of commercial capital.
Of course, fascinating as it is, in recalling this process we must
not fall into a fetishization of what has been called depeasantization.
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 187

This is in fact only one of the catastrophic forms of social parricide

or succession, supposing that there are non-catastrophic or non-
pathetic modes of reform of collective ideas. What is important about
the state of separation is the openness to a substitution of beliefs and
the revocation of essential loyalties, that is, the substitution of one
conception of the world for another. Here receptivity itself is what
matters and not depeasantization, which is its English version.
The French Revolution produced a similar state of receptivity with­
out voluntary long-term depeasantization. Moreover, it would be
wrong to believe that in Russia receptivity arose from forced collec­
tivization. Such a barbaric act was indeed possible because there was
a pre-existing social receptivity. This demonstrates that revolutionary
pathos is a natural vehicle for the production of general receptivity
within the parameters of our era. If this is true, it is no less true, how­
ever, that war, natural catastrophes and great plagues or epidemics
can produce similar states of consent or dramatic dislocation, all this
apart from the democratic logic of transformism.
*

We can now sum up the situation of the national problem in Bolivia

at the moment of the general national crisis of 1899 as follows: Potosí
had constituted a kind of commercial unit or contingent market in
an area that spanned (at least) the present Bolivian territory plus the
south of Peru and the north of Argentina. On this base a powerful
administrative superstructure—the Audiencia of Charcas—was
erected. To the above factors we must add the nature of the compo­
sition of this market that was based on depeasantization by the mita
and the so-called forasteros, on the one hand, and on the other, by
the repressive formation of the market or controlled trade (forced
commercialization). The aleatory elements of this, which can be con­
sidered the first market, are clear, and not only because the inevitable
‘non-equivalent exchange’, which is one of the sources of regionalism,
that is, of the political regime of the gamonal, could only give rise to
188 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

what is called an ‘irrational capitalism’, which is at the very core of the

formation. Hence the question arises as to whether this capitalism is
reformable or if, as in Russia, it is a matter of tasks that can only be
fulfilled by socialism. At the same time, given that the logic of this
market was determined by the silver mining industry, it was a con­
tingent and impermanent system of exchange and it effectively per­
ished even before the mercury crisis as a result of the decline of
Potosí, with the mercury market itself and the debt of the mercury
miners and, subsequently, with the devastation and forcible return
to a natural economy that came with the War of Independence.
Finally, given that the support or protection of the ‘sovereignty’ of
the Audiencia was exogenous, there could not but be an administra­
tive debacle with the factual disappearance of Spain form the
panorama, first with Napoleon and then with independence.
The colonial regime created a deeply ingrained seigneurial-
servile culture. In successfully resisting the social formations of the
colony, with the artisans and the communities, a kind of centrifugal
solution arose: territorial losses, the fragmentation of the land and
the gamonalization of what was left are all one and the same. With
ideas steeped in a racist and anti-popular discourse, and with great
resentment in its soul, this caste unaccustomed to thinking of any­
thing beyond the legitimacy or illegitimacy of its pedigree constructed
a kind of provincial seigneurial subsystem, with epicentres now utterly
scattered, with a distinct culture, decadent but not without a certain
malevolent grace that nonetheless had a local stamp, which was pop­
ular, with its pleasures, its hypocrisy and its idleness. The very cir­
cumstances of the world market fostered a kind of modernization of
this caste that threw itself into the venture of self-reconstruction with
the second silver boom and the assault on the communal lands. It fol­
lowed the logic of all doomed classes. It aspired to become a powerful
axis, but neither La Paz nor Chuquisaca, its capitals, were in any con­
dition for such a thing. They did not consider for an instant under­
going a serious embourgeoisement and perhaps they did not even
 THE WORLD OF THE FEARSOME WILLKA • 189

know what that meant; rather, they wasted whatever they could
snatch up of the accidental surplus in the augmentation of their
seigneurial symbols, land in particular. After Melgarejo and the farce
of free trade with the conservatives, they could not aspire, moreover,
to any kind of moral-political prestige, rural or urban.
 CHAPTER THREE

The Torpor of Centuries

Does what has been called ‘Darwins immanence mean that natural
selection was an inevitable myth or ideologeme of the circumstances
of originary accumulation? We could say, indeed, that this and its
extension to the social sciences that is social Darwinism, the claim
that ‘the supremacy of one people over another was the inevitable
outcome of the biological laws of the universe’,1were ideas too con­
temporary with a certain specific process, which is nothing less than
the rise of the West. Darwin himself, to be sure, seems to have had
little to do with these particular opinions. They constitute, rather, a
certain reading of the so-called dismal science (that of Malthus) by
way of Spencer. An exegetic and facile reading, moreover, like every­
thing that man wrote or thought. He founded a school of abhorrent
but powerful ideas.
But what doubt is there that the first element in man’s self­
recognition (and recognition should mean to re-encounter oneself)
is his appearance, his material face, his mode of appearing before the
world, his existence as phenomenon? To be, certainly, is also to
appear. We must, however, distinguish between this ‘folk racism, a
popular system of prejudice’2 (because prejudices constitute the his­
tory of the world) through which every group harbours an essential
mistrust and abhorrence of its neighbour (at least provisionally),
what can be called a universal and ancestral contempt among men,
who despise all that they do not know, that is, ‘folk racism’, and the
rather doctrinarian intent to systematize this as an interpretation of

1 Marvin Harris, The Rise o f Anthropological Theory: A History o f Theories o f

Culture (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001), p. 81.
2 Ibid.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 191

the world. That such thinking is dangerous, like almost any other
used in this way, is abundantly clear. But it is equally clear that it is a
danger to which mans basic nature tends. The natural sciences them­
selves are today imbued with and enveloped in these prejudices,
whence we can see that it is an ideologeme that runs right through
to the final flourishes in the construction of the scientific paradigms
themselves. It has always been a matter of proving pre-existing
prejudices.
In any case, it was Wallace, who had been the co-author of some
work by Darwin, who wrote: ‘In every generation the inferior would
inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the
fittest would survive,’3 whence Spencer deduced the expression
‘survival of the fittest’. It was a creed destined for formidable success.
Its emergence, if we wish to contextualize it, must be located in the
process of universal subjectification (the constitution of subjects)
that derives from the ‘entitlement’ or birth of the state of separation
that is from the beginning simultaneous with or attended by what
has been called possessive individualism.
We maintain, therefore, first, that racial difference as appearance
or phenomenon is an originary fact. It is not something that can be
ignored in the process of anagnorisis. Second, that we are speaking
here of an ancient feeling among men, that of group empathy, whose
ancestral tendency towards a mistrust of the other is but the form of
aversion or resistance to the unknown whose object is human.
Finally, that the intense subjectification proper to the new forms of
totalization was not possible without a negation of its constitutive or
original points of reference, which were precisely the germs of other
totalities or nations.
It seems to us that with race the same thing happens as with
many other ideologemes: they need not be rational in themselves in
order to serve rational ends. Anti-Semitism is barbaric but it has
produced certain instances of ‘national recognition which is not

3 Cited in ibid., p. 123.

192 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

barbaric. A common belief in an absurdity can bind men together,

although this ends up poisoning the resultant collectivity. To grant
another recognition of identity with oneself or not to do so is an act
of valorization and not a rational act per se. The result of these
groundless acts of acceptance is the collectivity or nation, which is,
however, a rationally valid totality because, at least in the world we
live in, it is better to be a nation than not to be one and the form of
being in the age is the national form.
In any case, nationalization through depeasantization or the
‘Darwinian destruction of the peasantry, which is in effect the tra­
ditional form, is inferior in our view to a political process of nation­
alization, like that of the French, in which the dissemination of a
discourse of equality overdetermines the forms of economic unifi­
cation. Similarly, an interpellative process, national or not, centred
on essentially irrational or valorative premises like that of race is not
the same thing as one founded on rational models such as that of
democratic articulation. And there is no doubt that equality derives
from a rational process while race is a mythic construct, founded on
the conviction of an originary inequality. Things are of course more
complicated than this, because even an externally antidemocratic
interpellation can have internally democratic consequences, etc.
Nonetheless, history itself would later prove that whenever a people
opts for primitive or magical (though precocious) forms of unifica­
tion, these will be reborn in time as despotic. The pragmatic idea of
neutrality with regard to the contents of the interpellative call (in
general, the vindication of fallacious but successful forms of inter­
pellation) is no doubt a voluntarist idea, despite all appearances. It is
always of crucial importance to determine the ideas around which a
people has been unified.
*

In any event, since ours is an age that has chosen to recognize itself
through its great men, in a kind of heroic conception of a history that
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 193

has had no true heroes, social Darwinism became a pervasive creed

in Bolivia, one that cut across the entire social fabric. Indeed, perhaps
nowhere else is the condemnation of the national man so habitual.
The catalogue of such denunciations is formidable.
According to José Domingo Cortés, perhaps our first historian,
who claimed to have been well acquainted with the Indians:
The Indian is vigilant in his own business and lazy in all else;
he know no virtue and praises what is evil; he seeks always
to deceive, and believes himself to be cheated; he is sired by
self-interest and the father of envy; when he appears to give
he sells; he is so opposed to truth that he lies with his very
countenance; he holds himself to be innocent when he is
malice itself; he treats his mistress as his wife and his wife as
a slave; he appears chaste and sleeps in lechery; when you
beg him he grows haughty; when given orders, he feigns
exhaustion; he loves no one and mistreats himself; he is all
mistrust and suspects even himself; he speaks well of no one,
much less of God and this because he does not know Him;
he perseveres in idolatry and affects religiosity; devotion in
him is mere ceremony; he uses worship as a means to ine­
briation and this he uses to commit atrocities; he murmurs
when he seems to pray; he eats just enough to live, and sleeps
without a care; he knows no sacrament and makes a sacra­
ment of everything; he believes all that is false and repudi­
ates all that is true; he falls ill like a beast and dies without
fear of God.4
This represents a widely held view. [Mariano] Baptista said that
the ‘lettered and Christian class, that which lives in an atmosphere
of civilization, has a great horror of the Aymara.’5Here is his portrait
of the Aymara man:

4 José Domingo Cortés, La República de Bolivia (Santiago: Imp. de El Inde­

pendiente, 1872), pp. 119-20.
5 Cited in Condarco Morales, Zarate, el temible Willka, p. 38
194 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

This Indians face, his gaze, his features, are of stone like the
granite of his mountains. There is no expression in that face:
there are no contractions; it chews and swallows inertly. I
have studied it many times, since my childhood, filled with
fear for humanity. The Aymara walks past the white man
without looking at him, or glancing at him out of the corner
or his eye. In the high peaks, in the immense steppes, only
the traveller, cholo or viracocha, crosses his path. It seems
that on such occasions, a spontaneous sympathy should
instinctively draw man to man, but the Aymara never greets
you. Not a syllable of his barbarous dialect issues from his
throat: and we hardly hear its timbre when, crouching in the
door of his hovel, he answers gruffly: janihua, which is a
refusal of all service.
And then: ‘What kind of sensations stir in him? . . . And how
can we discover them with our fear of the unthinkable? They dont
speak in their stuttering, they only gesticulate like imbeciles.’
These are the words of Baptista who, according to Prudencio
Bustillo, was ‘the greatest political mind ever produced by the Bolivian
race.*6
On the other hand, Gabriel René Moreno, the most renowned
of Bolivian writers, took for granted that mestizos and Indians were
subalterns ‘as a consequence of the very cells that make up their
wicked nature and deficient minds’;7 and he spoke of the Inca Indian
as ‘sombre, foul, elusive, meek, stupid and sordid’;8 therefore:
The men of Chuquisaca wanted to subject [it] to the Indian
laws and decrees of Toledo; laws and decrees made to crush
and wring the Inca Indian, shrewd, devious, filthy, taciturn,

6 Cited in ibid., p. 39.

7 Cited in ibid., p. 40.
8 Cited in Augusto Guzman, Baptista: Biografia de un oradorpolitico (La Paz:
Juventud, 1957), p. 121.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 195

abject, a stranger to truth, never surrendering body and soul

to the Spaniard like the neophyte of Moxos.9
Even mestizaje itself through illegitimate unions ‘meant the insti­
tutional degeneration of the country.’10
Let us consider now the thoughts of Pando himelf, called Tata in
memory of Belzu: ‘What would it cost to implement a policy of uni­
versal education? How long would it take? [ . . . ] The task would be
impractical. It would be far more practical, then, to eliminate them.’
And: ‘The Indians are inferior beings and their elimination is
not a crime but a “natural selection”, a difficult and repugnant task
but one that is imposed by the necessities of industry.’11
Or also: ‘The problem of this race of savages seems to be unsolv-
able: the Indian’s tiny brain cannot, even through intellectual culti­
vation, develop like a muscle.’12
And he decreed their ‘necessary slavery’ and inevitable extinc­
tion. Zarate would seem an unlikely ally.
Saavedra’s words are even more telling because in the Mohoza
trial he acted as a spokesperson for the whole Hispanic bloc in the
judgement of the events of the Federal Revolution. The Mohoza mas­
sacre was
The manifestation of a ferocious and savage outbreak of a
morally atrophied race, or one degenerate to the point of
dehumanization. [The Indians] feign an ‘abject submission’
when they find themselves in an inferior position, but in
groups they are haughty, stubborn, audacious, and can
become fearsome beasts.13

9 Gabriel René Moreno, Nicomedes Aritelo (Santa Cruz: UGRM, 1960), p. 53.
10 Ibid., p. 32.
11 Cited in Juan Albarracín Millán, Orígenes del pensamiento social contem­
poráneo de Bolivia (La Paz: Juventud, 1976), p. 193.
12 Cited in ibid., p. 194.
13 Saavedra, ‘Proceso Mohoza’, n.p.
196 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

As to Willka’s ideals, Saavedra does not deny them but for him
they are the ‘obsessions’ o f‘bloodthirsty orangutans’. It is, in short, ‘a
degenerate race in the process of its final dissolution’. Saavedra who
is, moreover, as leader of the artisans, a kind of predecessor of pop­
ulism, is then the author of this ‘tragic racist pamphlet’ that according
to Albarracin is ‘perhaps the most anti-Indian piece of literature in
all of Bolivian sociology as a document of white racism’.14 The Indian
is ‘no more than a beast of burden, miserable and abject, who warrants
no compassion and must be exploited to the point of inhumanity and
indignity’15 and, in short, ‘if we must eliminate them, because they
constitute an obstacle to our programme, let us do it frankly and
energetically’;16 ‘If he [the Indian], consumed by suffering, rebels
against his oppressors [ . . . ] then he must be crushed like a danger­
ous animal.’17
States, like individuals—like men—cannot live things without
representing them, that is, without conceptualizing them. These are
the founders of the ideology of the oligarchic state. They were based,
as we will see in the following chapters (which look at the state that
was constructed against this one), on something that long preceded
the oligarchic state and that would survive long after its destruction.
It is one of the elements of the deep ideology of this society, at least
that of the elite, seigneurial and Hispanic stratum. As we have seen in
the particular articulation of the seigneurial (the structure of complic­
ity), this itself necessarily includes important sectors of the oppressed
because there is always one beneath the last of the inferior ranks and
the consecration of hierarchies does not recognize an intelligible
logic. What is interesting in this case is that the ideology of the his­
torical foundation, in a kind of suicidal outburst, expresses itself also

14 Juan Albarracin Millan, El gran debate: Positivismo e irracionalismo en el

estudio de la sociedad boliviana (La Paz: Universo, 1978), p. 243.
15 Saavedra, ‘Proceso Mohoza, p. 145.
16 Ibid., p. 146.
17 Ibid., p. 145.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 197

as appearance or phenomenon. In its explicit ideology, for example,

the US state is Jeffersonian but it knows what its inner ideology is.
There is always in every state a set of ideological premises that are
the secret of the state and that are transmitted and reproduced but
that cannot be made explicit within the logic of the apparent forma­
tion, which is proper to the institutions of capitalism. The whole of
the history condensed in Willka turned out to be so maddening that
it forced these men to unwittingly commit the mortal sin of betraying
the secret of the state. The necessary split between the eternal and
esoteric ends of the state and its apparent ends would only be recov­
ered with revolutionary nationalism, which would find in this inflec­
tion one of its indisputable advantages over the oligarchic state.
Whether he was ‘the greatest political mind ever produced by
Bolivia18or not, that this was said of him proves the importance of
the figure of Baptista. One can forgive certain conspiratorial deser­
tions and even a certain servility towards the mining families of the
time; we can also understand that he was deeply affected by the death
of his son. For this very reason, a man like him should have grasped
that with those facile remarks, still common today among whites, he
was poisoning a long legacy. He was, nonetheless, our Marti.
With Pando or Saavedra, as with Moreno, who reached his rank
as a result of his great talent (although it was less significant in poli­
tics itself), the contradictions become insuperable. But contradic­
tions, as we will see in the three cases, can take on a life of their own.
The best of Pando undoubtedly lies in a certain practical obses­
sion with the territory. If the men of his time had had the same geo­
graphic conception as he did, perhaps things would have been
different, or at least so some have thought. Pando was able to recog­
nize that that ‘passion for the territory’ was irreconcilable with the
elimination of the men who belonged to that space. Furthermore,
when he was the idol of the Aymara and was waging a winning fight

18 Ignacio Prudencio Bustillo. See note 8.

198 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

thanks to their support, it was incongruous for him to share the the­
ses of the very men he had defeated, those of Baptista or Saavedra,
who called for the unsparing and immediate extermination of the
Aymara. That all this would end in the consolidation of so anodyne
and so ‘Montista a government proves that a kind of impersonal rea­
son was being fulfilled. Within this logic it was acceptable to exter­
minate the cambas’, to solicit Willkas support, to betray and murder
Willka, and then later or simultaneously to express the opinion that
the cambas’ should be exterminated and the Aymara leader elimi­
nated. Pandos conscience was clear after all this because this is how
an entire community thought (within the scope of the caste).
Moreno, in turn, a thoroughly modern man, had thoroughly
understood the logic of Argentine Europeanization. Indeed, he had
denounced
the plan to isolate and Europeanize Argentina in America
[and the] so-called porteñismo of the isolation of Río de la
Plata to achieve this Europeanization of workers, capital, and
commerce most expediently. [ . . . ] So Buenos Aires, which
had invited her sisters, the most properly Argentinian
provinces, to reap the fruits of Europeanization, will break
its American ties decisively for itself and in their name, to
enjoy this Europeanization together.19
If this same man could so lucidly grasp the interpellation of Char­
cas, that is, the subsequent Potosí market, as well as the role played
by Belcismo, for which he was himself labelled a red like his country­
man the illustrious but confused [Andrés] Ibáñez, even if only out of
envy or intrigue, why did he have to succumb to such a humiliating
role as that of a regional intellectual, as had occurred already in a more
ambiguous way in Archivo de Moxosy Chiquitos and in a unequivocal,
that is, a purely provincialist way in Nicomedes Antelo?

19 Gabriel René Moreno, Ayacucho en Buenos Aires, y Prevaricación de Riva-

davia (Madrid: Editorial América, 1917), pp. 65-7.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 199

Moreno had already said things as significant as this with regard

to the undignified conduct of the Bolivians in the government of the
time: ‘A generation like the present one in Upper Peru, let them say
what they will with their acolytes and sycophants within, has not
known how to preserve intact, above all human error or interest, the
territorial inheritance of their forefathers, etc’20, evidently expressing
a certain characteristic Eastern sentiment of the frontier, which is
typical. However, the provincialism that followed selected the worst
of Moreno, the most parochial. Why not also vindicate his anti-
Europeanism, which is a form of nationalism even if of the right,
and his own Belcismo in partibus? Because they were factors inimical
to the construction of the new oligarchic thought that was not so
complex as Moreno’s, which was at once anti-European and anti-
indigenous, nationalist and regionalist, pro-Belcista and Charqueno?
There is no worse enemy of a contradictory thinking than its minor
contradictors.
As for Saavedra, whose thought was perhaps the most organized
and the most modern among the men of his time (which is not
saying much), however, there is no doubt that he is considered the
man of the greatest popular sensibility of those who belonged to the
conservative-liberal-republican period. For this very reason, because
he was an energetic man little accustomed to making concessions,
his is no doubt the prevailing vision in this society, which had
become so reactionary with its renewed terror of the Indian threat.
By no means should one believe that his were unpopular ideas within
those ranks. It would be ingenuous to suppose that a state was con­
structed with no social base: in reality, a broad sector of those not
excluded through an ancestral marginality must have shared this
thinking and, like the sheep ofAchacachi, they accepted it as perfectly

20 Gabriel René Moreno, Biblioteca boliviana: Catálogo del archivo de Mojos

y Chiquitos (Bolivian Library: Catalogue of the Archive of Mojos and Chiq­
uitos) (Santiago: Impr. Gutenberg, 1888) [La Paz: Juventud, 1974], p. 110.
200 • RENfi ZAVALETA MERCADO

natural. This is an early expression of the distinction between towns­

people [vecinos] and Indians, which would be of vital importance.
Voltaire’s racism and Goethes anti-Semitism were troubling
because these were diseased elements in great spirits who are like the
stewards of the soul of the age. Spencers racism is not, because it is
to be expected that small-minded men cultivate prejudices. Ulti­
mately, the survival of the fittest would be demonstrated in the
inevitable disappearance of his eminently forgettable oeuvre. The
same can be said of Alcides Arguedas, whom we have deliberately
not cited because he was clearly an insignificant writer of bad prose,
of great pretensions and inferior ideas poorly expressed. The irony
consists in that the illustrious learned from the mediocre. They, the
illustrious, embodied the essence of the age and in a way they
founded it, if only in following it to its root. We must ask ourselves
what happened to them.
*

Every age has an ideology. There are certainly ages that have only a
vague notion of their own ideological contents but this, ideology, will
take its final shape sooner or later; this is what Marx meant when he
said that the ideas of the age are those of the ruling class, although
we could also say this the other way around: the ruling class becomes
the ruling class by reading, from its position of lucidity, the ideas that
will be dominant or that are dominant only in a potential and
obscure way. In other words, ideology results from the social sub­
stance and not the social substance from ideology; even negative or
critical ideology expresses elements that will develop inexorably.
Therefore, the struggle has predefined the context in which the ideas
that will make it explicit will emerge.
This clearly applies to the case that constitutes the object of our
study. Social Darwinism, the idolization of the surplus, even
xenophilia, were the results of class struggle in the specific context
of the defeat of the diffuse and vast party that was called Belcismo.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 201

The state, then, shifted, according to a logic that permitted a resolu­

tion, at least in theory, of the seemingly eternal stalemate between
the plebeian party and the evolution of Ballivianismo. With the
exclusion of the Indians and the artisans, the effective civil society,
that which was capable of producing political effects (which of course
did not coincide with the real civil society), now thought in social
Darwinist terms and in all else they restored the thinking of the oli­
garchic state. With minor variations, Moreno expressed the same
thing as Baptista and Pando. It was therefore an epochal ideology.
They merely formalized as thought what had been assumed in soci­
ety following the political expulsion of the Indians and cholos.
Willka, in contrast, provided the affective conditions for this to be
expressed decisively. Not to vanquish at the right time always creates
a supervictory for the enemy; it exaggerates the enemy’s triumph.
But to this argument we must add another: the relative ease with
which the oligarchic party imposed itself weakened it, as often hap­
pens, because victory is not always to ones benefit. If there is an over­
arching ideology of the age, it can also be said that the state has its
own tempo, which is only relatively dependent upon this ideology.
In its very nature, the capitalist state must at once serve a logic of the
market (which is egalitarian, the ‘paradise of the rights of m an) and
a logic of surplus-value, which is not. So, surplus-value must be
hidden so that it does not disappear, and hence the substantive
schizophrenia of the formulation of the social facts of capitalism:
surplus-value must appear as profit, value as price, inequality as
equality. This is commodity fetishism, or the problem of what in
Marx are called apparent formations.21 The same occurs with the
state: a state must always have a legitimating or explicit ideology; but
it would be incomplete if it did not have an ideology or representa­
tion of the world as identity, that is, of self-reference, which is what

21 See René Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Las formaciones aparentes en M arx’ in

Historia y Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana de Pensamiento Marxista
(México) 18 (1978): 3-27.
202 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Hegel called self-certainty and what we can call the form of its class
character. On both ends, if this, which is a law of the modern state,
is not fulfilled, we have a kind of failure. An identity between legiti­
mation or the explicit ideological emission and self-consciousness
exists, for example, in backward states. The result is that this reac­
tionary synthesis produces a transience or instability of the state. On
the other extreme, a true identity between what the state is and how
it appears would make the state useless. It would have to disappear
ipso facto. And yet, the state can only develop self-certainty in accor­
dance with the requirements of civil society, which it serves through
its legitimating or explicit ideology. Here Bacons dictum holds true:
nature—like society—to be commanded must be obeyed.
How did the oligarchic state behave in relation to this law? With
a heedlessness that cost it dearly. It exaggerated the significance of
its victory and identified its internal ideology with its explicit ideol­
ogy. Its easy to have a certain unanimity if you exclude all your ene­
mies and this is what the oligarchic state did with its victory over
Belcismo and Willka; but very soon a ‘subterranean revenge would
come, as we shall see. That the warring parties—conservatives, lib­
erals, republicans—were so much in agreement as to the spirit of the
state shows that it was a question of dissension within the state party.
It also indicates that, after the exclusion of the Indians and the ple­
beian masses from the politico-legal country, the system enjoyed a
kind of deformed hegemony: it was the country that had been
besieged by Willka and the proclamation of its ideological pro­
gramme was an excess of the hour of victory. Meanwhile, that the
supposed discourse of legitimation, the outward ideology, and the
discourse of the states identity coincided is what explains the brevity
of its life and the suddenness of its downfall.
The revolutionary-nationalist school labelled this line of thought
anti-patriotic. This led to an ethico-Manichean discourse on the
national-popular. What is certain is that all of them, with the excep­
tion again of Arguedas, who was nothing but a bureaucratic hack in
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 203

search of sinecures, were men profoundly committed to their country.

Pando, for example, is more than his cruelty towards Willka; he is also
the source of the states feeling of connection to the territory or at least
one of its sources. Moreno, in turn, if he is the founder of a school of
prejudices in the society of the East, also showed the greatest national
pride, with Bolivar and the Colombians or with Melgarejos disregard
for the integrity of the national territory, in short, at all times. Baptista
himself, if we dismiss his understandable though illegitimate resent­
ment towards the Aymara and his desertion or liquidationist position
in his relations with Argentina, was no doubt a scrupulous negotiator
with Chile in unenviable circumstances.
Nor can a position like that of Sartor Resartor2223on the Chaco
question be understood only on the basis of that supreme enmity
between Saavedra and Salamanca. Still, a total inattention to appear­
ances, especially when founded on a contingent triumphalism, is
never without consequences.
But the real problem lies elsewhere. These men unconsciously
laboured against their country, against the only one that existed and
against themselves. They inflicted concrete injury on what they loved
in the abstract. This indeed reveals a psychology of the last o f a lineP
We must, of course, distinguish the qualitative aspects of racism
according to its different subjects. For example, Spencers racism or
the Anglocentrism expressed by Disraeli, who once said that he pre­
ferred the rights of Englishmen to the rights of man, constituted atti­
tudes of integrated men, belonging, beyond all doubt, for better or
worse, to a collectivity. They might be poor arguments, but these
were men who cultivated arguments in their own interest. In other
words, Disraeli s theses were in the interest of the English as a whole.
Mutatis mutandis, the same could be said of Alberdi and Sarmiento,
who made a number of idiotic remarks (not to mention Mitre, who
in his language and attitude is a precursor to Arguedas), but there

22 Pamphlet by Bautista Saavedra published in La Paz in 1933.

23 The expression is Carlos Medinacelis.
204 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

was no doubt that their anti-Americanism was not anti-Argentinian.

The repudiation of America was their way of constructing the Argen­
tinian. De-Americanization and de-indigenization were understood
in the same way as de-peasantization in the English process. This was
the Argentinian form of nationalization, one of a social Darwinist
mould, and Roca ultimately did no more in his military campaign
than what Alberdi proposed, a purge of the indigenous population.
Still, we must consider here the alterity of the Indian. For an
Argentinian or a Chilean, the Indians presence indeed represented
a negation. Neither La Araucaria nor Martin Fierro came out of
nowhere. This is largely because they were pre-state Indians, as we
saw in the first chapter, fierce Indians who could be subjugated only
at the cost of great difficulties. Cultures are defined by their modal­
ities of resistance. The Eastern Indian, for example, either did not
submit or submitted only to disappear immediately. Hence Moreno’s
preference for the Inca, because he ‘never surrendered body and soul
like the neophyte of the Moxo missions’.24 A culture of resistance is a
habit of organized men, as is the case with the Andeans, whose orig­
inary principle is organization, because otherwise life would have
been impossible. Moreno was surely more repulsed by the grime of
the Andeans than by that of the Spaniards, but between one and the
other there was little difference.
In any case, we are talking about countries and societies con­
structed against the Indians. Martin Fierro, however anti-indigenous,
is unquestionably a national epic. It is natural that, overtly or not, a
war that has been waged and won would be glorified, although this
would certainly instill racist and Europeanist elements that are
unmistakable in the specific form of alienation of those societies.
This is not the Bolivian model. We cannot say categorically that
Bolivia will be Indian or it will not exist, but, at least, among all its
programmes with any degree of viability, there is not one that posits

24 Moreno, Biblioteca bolivianay p. 51.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 205

a country without Indians. The least that could be done would be to

grant them an indisputable status within the nation. That, however,
is not what one might deduce from the reasoning of those founders
of the state: it is an entirely anti-hegemonic idea. The material recon­
struction of the flesh-and-blood society was attempted on the basis
of a fifth of its population. Men will form opinions that suit their
needs and it is obvious that the most candid subjectivity is subjec­
tivity for itself. The problem lies, rather, in discerning the social con­
ditions in which one reasons against oneself. The starting point is
the following: Saavedra or Moreno, one as much as the other, thought
that Bolivia as such was lost but not Moreno or Saavedra himself;
this indicates a split between the conception of the individual being
and its environment. They simply did not feel themselves to be a part
of it and, like the Argentinians and the Chileans, could not conceive
of their countrymen, the Indians, as such.
Let us leave aside the limited information that these men had at
their disposal, ultimately a result of living in what can be called the
most provincial of the provinces. But it is not simply a question of a
lack of information. That the idea of a European Argentina was
viable was proven by its de facto Europeanization, a clear case of
correspondence between reality and a prior utopia. The idea of a
European Chile, being false, at least proved to be a useful argument
for the construction of a nation in a certain sense: it was a lie that
had become plausible and what mattered then was the unanimity of
self-representation. A European Bolivia, on the other hand, was a
radical falsehood, an implausible impossibility. In other words, the
pan-Europeanism of the country’s heroes could not even serve as a
political lie or a productive fantasy. But they did not espouse it out
of ignorance. The facts are more terrible, more cruel. They were the
unconscious expression certain tragic social forces.
It was a kind of schizophrenia (understood as ‘mental dissocia­
tion, that is, hallucinations, fantastical illusions, and a disorganized
206 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

emotional life, together with a relative intellectual consistency’25)

because in this muddled apology for the white race and in locating
the viability of Bolivia in the whites, they were in fact defending the
viability of the vecinos who had proven to be anti-Bolivian almost
without exception, and this surely provided their enemies with the
arguments they needed. Why did they do it? This is the terrible thing:
because they believed in it. They believed in it to the peril of their
lives, unless we are to accept that this 10 or 15 per cent of Bolivia stood
any chance, as opposed to 90 per cent in Argentina or 30 per cent in
Chile. It was, then, a doctrine based on the expectation of imminent
defeat, accepted and inevitable even if disguised as a certain final hon­
our as with Moreno, Saavedra or even Salamanca himself.
This pessimism, the depressed spirit of an irremediably fallen
caste, a profound internalization of defeat—these are the conditions
that make it possible to reason against ones own country as those
Bolivians did then. They preferred to be lost along with the 10 per
cent whose chimeras had led the entire country to ruin rather than
to accept the principles, explicit or not, of the opposing majority. One
can surely consent in a moment of greatness to sacrifice oneself for
a misconceived truth, but here this truth turned out to be no more
than a class prejudice, a truth of convenience. In general, truth in
politics is too voluble a thing to sacrifice ones life for it. One must
fight for ones own truth, which is the only one that can be known.
General truth is an idea with which the powerful persecute the
oppressed. The proof of this is that the descendants of these Euro-
peanists today must encapsulate their arguments within an indi-
genism as contingent as that Europeanism. That is, it was a ‘truth*
destined to be short-lived.
The word disease has been thrown around. Here Arguedas
indeed had his reasons. The pathological here lies in that the caudil­
los reviled the men who granted them that rank and therefore took

25 Beatriz Barba de Piña Chán, La expansión de la magia (Mexico City: Insti­

tuto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1980), p. 227.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 207

for granted that it constituted a sort of recognition of a certain innate

privilege. We are dealing with a kind of sickness or neurosis—that
of men who reason against themselves. Its like a salesman arguing
that he should be paid less. Why did they do this? Because of a
seigneurial conception of life in which salvation and perdition are
tied to the lineage. They felt that Bolivia’s adversities concerned them
only indirectly; they thought, in short, that some (the lords) would
yet be saved, by virtue of their blood, when all was lost. This is the
most extreme case of a rupture of solidarity, of even a pragmatic sol­
idarity, with the country itself. Not all of them, however, lost their
composure as easily as Montes or Arce. For this, to save himself,
Moreno placed his hopes in his elegant prose, Baptista in who knows
what, other than a discourse, and Saavedra, in power; but they all
thought the same thing: there was no solidarity or identity at all
among the lords and masters.
The underlying problem is that of self-interest or the instinct of
self-preservation in the realm of thought. It must be said that to
reason against ones life is a grave sin. All men are indebted first of
all to themselves, to their identity. To fully possess oneself, that is, to
determine oneself, enables one to think of other things. First one has
to be oneself in order then to contribute something, if possible. A
certain degree of healthy selfishness is the key to sovereignty, but
also to class consciousness or to personality, to all forms of self-
determination. Therefore, just as Moreno hated with all the purity
of his legitimate rage those who had not known how to defend their
inheritance, we too can vehemently condemn those who failed to
give us reasons to defend it today. It is a charge no less terrible and
no less obvious.
In the study of the state, space, for example, does not have the
same content as in cartography; what exists on the map might not
exist for the state—we are referring to a space in which the state has
validity, to the habitat in which the authority of the state is enforce­
able, to the human terms of this enforceability. The same can be said
208 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

of the population; in this sense the only population that exists is that
which has been incorporated into the state or, as Kelsen said, into
the ‘human sphere of validity of the state’, which certainly need not
be equivalent to what exists in crude demographic terms. The Indi­
ans of the Amazon are self-determined in the middle of the rainforest
and therefore do not exist for Brazil as a state except when they
become an obstacle to it, because we are using a technical definition
and not an ethical one. These are well-known principles. Now, the
object of the state with regard to ideas is also the production of the
substance of the state or of ideas valid for the state, not of all ideas.
The same can be said of the state as producer: when the state pro­
duces steel, it does not produce steel but state substance and this
would be equally true if it produced shoes. In the sphere of ideas,
what should interest it are the ideas that can be validated within the
state, that is, ideas that can become the spirit of the state, for the sate
itself and also for civil society. When a ruling class produces ideas
that cannot be metabolized as its own by civil society, the state nec­
essarily exists in a relation of non-belonging to its very object or end
which is, precisely, society. To be durable, of course, domination must
be to some extent in the interest of the dominated; otherwise, soli­
darity is blocked from the outset.
It is said, to absolve Pando or Saavedra or Montes, that they merely
shared the ideas of their time; we could just as well claim that they
were, on the other hand, incapable of being contemporary with their
own time. All this is debatable, but to forget oneself, which is some­
thing concrete, in the service of the general spirit of the times, is already
the beginning of ones dependency or non-self-determination. If the
‘ideas of the age said all this, it would mean that the worlds ideas
favour the good fortune of some nations and the decline or elimina­
tion of others. The role of truth would be terrible indeed if its func­
tion were always to serve the victor. What is clear, in any case, is that
there are no neutral ideas and that the ideas of the world serve those
who produce them and who have succeeded in imposing them.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 209

If this proposition is to be carried through to its logical conclu­

sion, although it is true that we are now on shaky terrain, we must
return to the question of the validity or efficacy of ideas in the sphere
of the state. In short, an idea, false or not but adapted to its object,
even to a mythical one, can be valid from the point of view of the
state, as was Portales’ anti-indigenous order, for example. In the case
of these Bolivians, setting aside the inconsistency of their reasoning
and even the ethical infirmity of not knowing how to use their own
intellectual authority, the objective alienation of their spirits was
expressed in the essential inviability of their ideas as state ideas. All
this, moreover, with fallacious arguments. The solution for Moreno,
for example, consisted in:
1. ‘That [the Indian) be crushed under the foot of European
immigration.’ Why, then, protest against the Europeaniza­
tion of Argentina?
2. That racial ‘purification’ be carried out to produce the
‘unification’ of the national race, assuming of course that
the national race is one’s own.
3. ‘That miscegenation be encouraged with the Camba
Indian, but never with the Aymara or Quechua.’26
Which means, in a word: no Indians; but if there must remain
something of any of them, let it be of mine. Pando thought the same
but the other way around: ‘The Eastern Indians, that is, the Cambas,
had to be exterminated.’27 In an evidently arbitrary judgement,
Saavedra, in turn, within his general anti-indigenism, considered
the Aymara civilization to be ‘vast, great and ancient like the Incan’,28

26 Albarracín Millán, Orígenes del pensamiento social contemporáneo de

Bolivia, p. 156.
27 José Manuel Pando, ‘Viaje a la región de la goma elástica (N.O. de Bolivia)’,
Revista del Museo de La Plata, vol . 6 (La Plata: Talleres de publicaciones del
Museo, 1895), pp. 141-220. Cited in Albarracín Millán, Orígenes del pen­
samiento social contemporáneo de Bolivia, p. 185.
28 Saavedra, El ayllu: Estudios sociológicos (La Paz: Juventud, 1971), p. 51.
210 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

presumably because he identified the Aymara with his own region.

All this is patently absurd. In all three cases, under the pretext of
imagining an illusory community (for Moreno, without Kolias but
with Charcas; for Pando, without Cambas but defending the territory
they inhabited; for Saavedra, without Indians but with labour legis­
lation), they repudiated the real, living, flesh-and-blood collectivity
that was Bolivia with its Indian—Camba and Kolia—majority. It was
a true act of substitution of reality that could not be without conse­
quence, because to supplant the real is necessarily to lose ones mind.
It is a loss of or deviation from the real that derives from the seigneur-
ialist roots of their thought, taken to the point of aberrance. To return
to the examples cited above, which could of course be multiplied,
Alberdis plan or Portales’ ideas were legitimate from the point of view
of the state. It matters little, as we have said, that the Chileans were
mestizos (as Lipschutz has shown)29 so long as feeling European was
an effective part of their identity, because the decisive thing ultimately
is identity or the intersubjective discourse and not the fact of being
European. In Argentina this became a concrete fact and not just an
anti-Rosist utopia. It makes no sense to compare these ideas because
a project of this kind was fundamentally incongruous in Bolivia. That
men with the lucidity of those under discussion proposed such absur­
dities cannot simply be ascribed to their error: it tells us that the clan
to which they belonged, which was the traditional caste, was, as such,
as a human group, coming to the dead end of abject consciousness.
Whether or not they truly believed, as they surely did, in such
appalling ideas is irrelevant except insofar as it proves that they were
poor spiritual leaders and weak men of power, precarious masters of
a dark hour. The primary task of the state is always legitimation or
credibility. In other words, what cannot be legitimated does not exist.
This shows that the constitution of the oligarchic state at that
moment was flooded with an unprecedented fury, which defers all

29 Alejandro Lipschutz, Perfil de Indoamtrica de nuestro tiempo (La Habana:

Ed. Ciencias Sociales, 1972).
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 211

rational organization. Moreno was the founder of Bolivia’s national

history (as historiography); Saavedra for decades was a university
professor of great prestige; Pando was the caudillo of the Indian
masses, whose elimination he decreed—all this cannot be explained
except as a profound sense of disorientation on the part of the col­
lectivity to which they belonged.
If, in rather broad terms, we maintain that the first symptom lies
in reasoning against ones own life, proposing what cannot occur by
any means, the second consists in not finding the will to exist or to
vanquish, in not taking account of the world such as it is. Their ideas,
however, prevailed even if only in the narrow sphere that they had
created for their poor victory. The ideas of those illustrious men
founded a discourse and preserved the ancestral fury of Pizarro and
Almagro in a way that lives on today in every seigneurial heart. They
led to where they had to lead, to the permanent subordination of
Bolivia and to their own subordination because it was the last coun­
try capable of accomplishing such horrific, abhorrent and impossible
tasks. Only the action of the wretched of the earth would be able to
save the scraps that could still be rescued from the legacy of that soci­
ety in its absolute dislocation.
No racist thinks that in speaking of the subject he does not exag­
gerate. The radicality of the prejudices of our founders prevents us,
however, from thinking of them as hyperbolic. The men of this coun­
try, especially those of its ruling class, had entered a state of chaos.
Social Darwinism was exacerbated as a result of the double catastro­
phe of the Pacific, which subdued them to the point of admiration for
their enemy, and Willkas war, which terrified them to the point of
abhorrence of their brothers. The Indians—Baptista testifies to this—
are the Jews of Bolivia (as [Antonio de la] Calancha had noted),30 its
scapegoats. This, then, is the basis of the discourse of the oligarchic
state that in its four sub-phases (conservative, liberal, republican and
military) always maintains the same ideal foundation.

30 See Saavedra, El ayllu, p. 36.

212 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

From these poisoned roots arose that tree that wanted only to
fall. The problem is that all this could not remain shut up in the
closet, but would necessarily break out. Things would come to light
fully only when the state came to face the rest of the world, which it
would do through war. This is perhaps the central problem with
which any student of the events of Bolivian history since then and
even since the War of the Pacific must contend: the sense of ground­
lessness and bewilderment that all these events assume, as if life had
lost its skeleton, a generalized absurdity. Incoherence, then, is not a
mere metaphor but the defining attribute of the character of that
state, as it would later be of its conduct in the Chaco War, of its
behaviour in relation to the surplus, of the mad fanaticism with
which the upper echelon of this society fought against all democratic
forms, even the most basic.
What is strange in all this is the impotence of the intellect.
Salamanca was not, by any means, a man of less talent than Batlle,
as anyone who had known him would have attested. Baptista is said
to have been a brilliant man; Moreno was unquestionably a better
writer than Vicuña Mackena or Rodó; Saavedra was a man as impos­
ing as Irigoyen and more cultured. Toro, as we shall see, was at least
potentially a man of no less talent than Estigarribia. Here personalist
interpretations of all kinds are clearly inadequate. We can presume,
however, that Batlle believed in the equality of immigrants because
he himself was an immigrant in a country of immigrants. Each in
his own way felt himself to be part of what he did. In other words:
knowledge cannot be constructed against reality with impunity, nor
is knowledge ever independent from what one is.
*

An age of contempt, this period was described by Cuadros Quiroga

as ‘40 years of recklessness’.31 The era as a whole, if not for Willkas

31 Reference to an article titled ‘Cuarenta años de vida perdularia’ by José

Cuadros Quiroga, published in 1940 in the newspaper La Calle.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 213

war, which opens this phase of the state, the Chaco War, which
reveals its aspiration , and the April insurrection, which neutralizes
it, would have only a grotesque atmosphere, like a maelstrom of
depravity and monstrosity in the midst of a burning house. The sub­
stance of the era is determined by the oligarchy in its pristine form,
that is, by the seigneurial regrouping around the mining surplus and
its major firms. We see here, uninterrupted by caudillos (in the man­
ner of the nineteenth century) or popular uprisings, the oligarchy in
its historical form, in the full deployment of its beliefs, rituals and
principles. The people as such had been eclipsed with Melgarejos
victory and Zarates disastrous campaign. We could say that this is
the period of the rosea in its actuality or nakedness, certainly invalu­
able for the biography of a class but inexorable in demonstrating the
inviability of capitalism in Bolivia.
The devastating failure of the oligarchic project stands in stark
contrast to the cheerful certainty of its formulations. It is an era of
bold assertions. Everyone seemed to know where things were going
and it was an age in which Bolivia was unwavering. Amid the ruins
of an exclusive sphere of public opinion, it was a society that believed
too firmly. It was also, of course, the time when Bolivia was closest
to political and national extinction. Montes and his foolish, tri­
umphant pride turned Bolivia into a panglossian village, starving to
death and capable of nothing but self-satisfied. Although based on a
kind of apartheid, in this at least the liberals were unarguably suc­
cessful: in selling consent almost by the pound. This shift towards
groundless illusions was part of a certain enigmatic fantasy that
enveloped the misfortune of the age.
It is, then, the age of abject consciousness or of false consciousness.
The local political jargon speaks of the superstate or feudal-mining
state, all terms that are modest approximations of varying efficacy
to the scrutiny of an obvious fact that was the merely apparent or
pseudological existence of the state, an existence tangled up in its
real subordination to the dominant nucleus of ‘big mining and its
214 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

periphery, the rosea, that is, the mining superstate. And so when the
university reform movement launched the slogan ‘mines to the state
and land to the Indians it became a pivotal rallying call, because in
Bolivia the main oppressed groups were the Indians and the state. It
was a slogan that perfectly fulfilled its function as such, incisively
and with perfect concision.
It is here that we must begin a digression on sovereignty or self­
certainty or authority, which is the ethos of the state and means being
beholden only to itself. This is something that should not be reduced
to the absurd. Obviously, no one has or can acquire infinite self-
determination. What the concept implies is that a self-determinative
ethos is always present in the spirit of ones acts. In any case, not to
know what one is at least in the materiality of ones historicity is
already a form of non-existence or subordination.
We should perhaps emphasize the solipsistic nature of the sterile
digressions of recent attempts at a general theory of the state, based
on the principle of alocalism in political analysis. Indeed, if we can
speak of a mode of production in universal terms we must stop at
the moment of the regulative model, which is the limit of its validity,
that is, it can only comprehend the most strictly quantifiable aspects
of abstract labour and no more than some general outlines of the
superstructural phenomena, such as the freedom of modern men.
It is in a way a discussion exhausted not through elucidation but
through sheer accretion. In any case, it is clear that if there is a
structural order through which there exists a certain univocality with
regard to the capitalist mode of production or regulative model in
such different formations as France, the US, Mexico and Argentina,
this implies the principle of mundiality, that is, the logic of world
history, which is a new dimension like the sense of temporality.
Mundiality as generalization means, in a way that seems somewhat
paradoxical, that nations or particularities are also deeper and more
differentiated. In the past, the identity of a nation came from its iso­
lation; here it is a choice because each nation must define itself in
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 215

relation to mundiality. This is why the generalized framework of the

regulative model tells us very little about the social equation or the
specific difference of these countries, which is better expressed
through the concept of the socioeconomic formation. Since the type
of articulation between the relations of production and the super­
structure is one of the meanings of this concept, in this sense the
study of the superstructural sum has a local and historical connota­
tion; it does not have a logical explanation, but a causal-factual
one. This is why superstructures, even when the form of their
autochthony is reduced to the particular mode of reception of the
flow of mundiality, turn out to be a nucleus of irradiation because
they are the modified synthesis of the set of determinants that derive
from the subjects and conditions that, therefore, produce a kind of
active predicate of society. Ideological, state or juridico-political pro­
cesses always have as their structural explanation the accumulation
of their internal history. In the case at hand, there was an excess of
the world (or mundiality) in Bolivia but only because the Bolivian
historical process was incapable, in the first place, of producing a
viable articulation of the territory and, second, of building structures
of self-determination.
This is where the problem of the general will (or moi comtnun)
and that of equality intersect. At some point in time someone
acquires the ability to ‘desire for society and in its name. This means
to assume the general will or have the capacity to make ones own
will the general will. The conditions for this are, of course, the objec­
tive social possibility of the production of a general will and, sec­
ondly, the power to read this faculty as political state. Where there is
no general will there is only a sporadic, contingent and volatile will.
The general will is something that must not only include everyone,
horizontally but also all past generations and their legacy over the
course of time: over the longue durée subjectivity can only exist in
the form of a collectivity. In the very act of political excommunica­
tion of the Indians and of the masses as a whole, the oligarchic state
216 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

renounced from the outset the task of the production of a general

will; but the generality of its will is the specific force of the state and
this state was therefore the architect of its own impossibility.
It is important, however, given everything we have said, to try
to situate the oligarchic state in Bolivia within a general theory of the
moments of the state. We must of course consider that historical
analysis always turns out to be better suited to its object than classi­
fications according to generalities. What are construed as schools of
thought or doctrines regarding the state turn out to be verifiable his­
torical situations in different contexts and perhaps this indicates that
state theory, sociology or historical materialism all in fact rely on the
practical proof of historical subsumption.
In any case, with regard to the situation of the oligarchic state,
we can distinguish at least four moments:
1. We have, in the first place, the situation in which formal
or ornamental elements of the modern state exist but not
the foundations of its substantive existence. This occurred
with all the Latin American countries at the moment of
independence. It is an apparent state because the carto­
graphic dimensions do not correspond to the effective
space of the state, nor does its demographic volume cor­
respond to its enforceable legitimacy.
2. There is, on the other hand, a configuration opposite to
the first. Through pathos or pure chance, men who differ
from one another in their daily lives place themselves in
a position of offering or receptivity. The political state is
constituted as a more or less indefinite power over civil
society and therefore an almost general capacity for the
transformation of political habits is produced. The state
is capable of governing routine existence and there is a
contractual reform of daily life. This is what has been
called, with a certain intellectual vulgarity, the Hegelian
state.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 217

3. Here we must consider the situation in which the domi­

nant element in civil society becomes the political state
itself, in the flesh, that is, in a special apparatus separated
from society. The ruling class not only occupies the state,
but one and the other become the same. The subordina­
tion of the state to the dominant group is so complete that
there is no communication between civil society as a
whole and the state, but the ruling class imposes itself
upon both. In this sense, the Leninist or Engelsian sense
of the state (if it can be simplified in this way), what is
known as the instrumental concept, is not an archaic con­
ception but a discrete historical moment. One has an
instrumentalist conception of tsarism or of Somozism not
because one is an instrumentalist but because Somozism
and tsarism were.
4. Finally, we have organized capitalism. Here the state is
clearly separated. It is the practice of what Marx called the
relative autonomy of the state. It is a hegemonic exercise
in which the dominant element ‘learns’ [aprende] (appre­
hends [aprehende]) the appropriate forms of domination
from the dominated; the logic of the oppressor aspires in
a sophisticated way to contain within itself the logic of the
oppressed. This conception is present in Lenin’s theory of
dictatorship. Dictatorship then is democracy for us, the
internal democracy of the proletarian dictatorship, in the
same way that what is called democracy in general is
democracy within bourgeois dictatorship. Thus the cate­
gories of dictatorship and democracy acquire a constant
binary nature.
If we adhere to this schema—one that is surely incomplete and
whose value is largely taxonomical—the oligarchic state in its phys­
iognomy, and even in its character, oscillated between the apparent
state and the instrumental state. Its most pronounced distortion is
218 • RENfi ZAVALETA MERCADO

undoubtedly spatial. Space is a central fact of the past but it also con­
tains what a country aspires to be—it contains the principle of hope.
In its conception of the territory, which it did not aspire to integrate
nationally but to organize around the requirements of the mining
companies (an impermanent fetish) and of course in outright denial
of the spatial foundations of social memory, it was clearly a state
incapable of realizing its own objectives. In its conception of a
sphere of legitimacy that was oligarchic in its origin, which means
exclusive, based on the logic of the separation of citizens and pongos
or interdictos, it was a state that condemned itself to an apparent or
spectral existence. It ultimately accepted the demographic and spa­
tial boundaries conceded by its neighbours. Given that during the
entire period there was not a single president without some degree
of connection to the mining companies, with the obvious exceptions
of Busch and Villarroel, who already belong to the phase of its dis­
solution and decline, it is undeniable that to speak here of the rela­
tive autonomy of the state is ludicrous. The concept of the modern
state did not exist in the proud and empty heads of the men of the
oligarchic caste.
What characterized this power bloc that only for ease of exposi­
tion we call the oligarchy, in brief, was a certain lack of appetite for
self-determination. This must be conceived in terms of a long
process. It is not a question of the necessary mobilization of self­
determinative action by a catastrophic event: it is, rather, the social
production of a systematic desire or impetus. If self-determination
had to be realized immediately, there would only be such an impulse
when it—self-determination—existed fully, which is absurd. The
peculiarity of this state is that in none of its acts was there a true
desire for self-determination or when such a desire existed—we are
thinking of Salamanca and his party—it was in relation to factors
that were absolutely secondary like the Paraguayans and not in
relation to the central problems of sovereignty. For Salamanca
sovereignty was about the Gran Chaco and not about history. The
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 219

miners’ conception of space seemed entirely compatible to him with

an utterly imperative attitude towards a peripheral territorial dispute.
*

Willkas masses emerged at the same time as the oligarchic programme

of La Paz, that is, with Pandismo. Pando in tuito persona embodied
the enviable possibility of a victory at once regional and popular,
which would not only expel the conservatives and Chuquisacans but
would also give rise to a certain potential hegemonic platform that
would have been inconceivable from the Southern perspective. And
yet, in reacting in accordance with its ancestral reflexes and not its
sound judgement, the Pando liberals, which means all of them,
sealed the antipopular character of the state they founded. The inclu­
sion of the popular sectors would never go beyond the narrow front
of the Saavedrist artisans and Achacachis sheep; there was an explicit
disjunction or externality vis-à-vis the popular. With this, the liberals
washed their hands of what could have been a formidable burden
but, at the same time, they completely deflated the margins of their
project which would henceforth be slight. The existing power,
exploiting what receptivity was left after having squandered the hege­
monic capacity of Willkas masses, followed the path of the psychol­
ogy of its class, a psychology with little sense of power or of its
mediations and none whatsoever of sovereignty. In a way, the timid­
ity or lack of desire for self-determinative habits in the oligarchy was
a response to a certain tradition, one that stands in contrast to the
sensibility of the masses. The ready acceptance of all things foreign
is significant in contrast to the thoroughly local self-determinative
style of the masses.
This has certain structural effects. We have come to an important
problem—in the discourse of dependency, we know that we are
dependent but not when our dependency ends. Countries are of
course always dependent up until a certain point. Whether we look
at Germany or Japan or Italy or Russia, there is a moment of popular
220 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

acquisition of a sense of self-determination or at least such a sense is

acquired in the discourse of the state.
It is a true break in the form of power. It is not an arbitrary will,
but a structure of self-determination, that is, a kind of transpersonal
conviction, which does not depend on the support of power but
that instead provides a framework or norm whose transgression is
illegitimate. Hence, when we speak of self-determination, we must
distinguish between accidental or pathetic acts and what we are
calling a structure of self-determination: this, the structure, is an
objective fact, at least to the extent that collective and un renounce-
able beliefs can be objective. The emergence of such structures
remains enigmatic, at least in part, although it is clear that it must
be attended by certain instances of surrender or opening to the gen­
eral will. Self-determination itself is really an aspect of the general
will and self-determinative acts are accidental or fortuitous to the
extent that they fail to acquire a certain pattern of repetition in
time—to the extent that they do not come to constitute a structure.
The case of the oligarchic state is a counterexample. First,
because a generality of the will did not exist even as a utopian idea,
while the constitutive pact was based on a regime of exclusion.
Montes, Salamanca or Saavedra could perhaps believe to some extent
in a certain dignity of the state but the idea of the self-determination
of Bolivia as a society and as a state was unquestionably alien to
them. The subordinate character of the country seemed to them to
be determined by fate, a natural fact. This is the perspective from
which it was said that ‘we are a poor country and we must live like a
poor country’.32 It is an extreme case of docility in the face of a col­
lective loss of freedom.
In certain circumstances, self-determination can be derived
from a charismatic interpellation (as occurred in Belzu’s era), but
this lasts as long as the power that sustains it. The social base in
which self-determination is rooted is therefore crucial to explain its

32 The phrase is attributed to president Carlos Blanco Galindo (1930).

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 221

emergence. In other words, the most consistent self-determination

is that which derives from democratic exchange because in it the
shared identity takes the form of equality. Self-determination is the
collective or national extension of personal dignity, that is, of the
extent to which the free individual exists, and if the collectivity has
the strength that it has in capitalism it is because it is the result of
interpenetration or interdiscursivity among free men. Surely it is a
false personal dignity that is founded on the erosion of the dignity
of another, because this exclusivizes or isolates instead of generalizing
its meaning. This means that the free man tends naturally to extend
his liberty towards the political and certain profound tendencies
towards political democracy and self-determination are hence
derived. It is this mass element that gives sovereignty its corporeality.
Where men are not homogeneous or do not have active symbolic
elements of homogeneity, they tend not to identify their Other as
Other because their identity is obscured: the seigneurial caste thinks
the Other is the Indian, not the foreigner. The opposition here is
between a racial-culturalist project and a national project. The inter­
nal Other is a much more powerful negative point of reference than
the true or external other. The extension of homogeneity, or of inter-
subjective sympathy, so to speak, determines the emergence of
feelings of self-determination.
Democracy is of course only the paradigmatic form of the emer­
gence of this modern myth. We cannot say that it is the only one—it
has certainly taken authoritarian forms. The Prussians acquired this
impulse from the French invasions and a reasonable fear of the West
triggered it in Meiji Japan, although there were conditions in both
cases that preceded these. Why did the same thing not occur with a
humiliation so terrible, so needlessly atrocious, as that inflicted by
Chile in Peru or Bolivia? Men who come from elsewhere take much
longer than one might think to become incorporated into their new
space; it is a debt that must be paid over the long term or in dramatic
events (because the drama consists in an act that is not gratuitous:
one who witnesses it emerges a different man). The liturgical market.
222 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

that is, economic privilege based on race and religion, only accentu­
ated this alienation and those who profited from it ended up con­
structing their own tiny country or subculture, which was the
oligarchy. An oligarchy that had barely begun to crack the protocul-
tural codes of the place could not counterpose a national idea to that
of their foreign assailants because they felt more alien to the Aymara
or Quechua multitude than to the Chilean army. Everything indicated
to them that ultimately their allies were latter—the foreigners—and
not the former. Its not that they had no patriotic feeling but that in
them the logic of the lineage, exaggerated to the point of absurdity,
had always been more decisive than the logic of the nation.
With power monopolized in so few hands, in which the suppres­
sion of the principles of equality and dignity was legally sanctioned
and was practically a tenet of the state, Montes and his cohort of sell­
outs acted, after Zarates defeat, in accordance with all the deep con­
victions of a caste so mysteriously alien to its own home.
*

We can identify certain regularities here. In the formation of the axis

or equation, the state, furiously possessed by a kind of messianic rage,
relates to society on social Darwinist terms. The development or for­
mulation of the social Darwinist discourse, however, is one thing,
and the ideological practice of social Darwinism, its brutal manifes­
tation, is another. From Baptista to Saavedra, from Moreno to Pando,
the ideas formulated are in fact collective ideas; but they are those of
a collectivity that could not imagine itself beyond its existing bound­
aries. It was a caste that, within the gamonal conception of space,
was united only through the negation of its enemies. As [Alberto]
Gutiérrez would say, it’s clear that Melgarejismo was not a spiritual
and material enterprise that began and ended with Melgarejo but the
horizon of the mode of being of this class.33 Just as Montes would

33 Alberto Gutiérrez, El melgarejismo antes y después de Melgarejo (La Paz:

Velarde, 1916).
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 223

negotiate the territory in terms identical to Melgarejos, now as

minister of defence he directed the leader of the Abaroa regiment
in Viacha against what he called the ‘Insurrection of the Indian horde:
‘In resorting to arms, we must shoot to kill; warning shots that
serve no purpose but to diminish respect for the armed forces are
prohibited.’34
There is nothing new here and, on the contrary, it is simply an
extension of what some have called the expansion of the seigneurial
landholding regime systematically instituted with Melgarejo.35
Montes himself, creator of the brilliant tactic of shooting to kill,
almost obscenely, would come into possession of the Taraco hacienda,
expelling its peasant community. These are the origins not only of
the oligarchy of the 50s but also of the present one; as we shall see
later, the descendants of these men are present and active in todays
society.
With this observation we mean only to say that it is the climate
of the era, in this case its stale, foul air, which enabled the espousal
of social Darwinism by some of its ideologues and not the ideologues
themselves: they conformed to a general conception of things. This
has a material origin—what the effective collectivity thinks is a syn­
thesis of the results of the class struggle. The victors want to erect
their flag in the name of all. This is the reactionary unconscious
of Bolivian society. It is its secret ideology and its ‘domination
complex’ that produce the instinctive acts of the state in a process
whose rationalization is beside the point; in this case the genocidal
instincts of the oligarchic spirit surfaced in a literal way. It is the ide­
ology in which this state existed; social Darwinism as Weltan-
schaaung and the dispossession of the Indians as a bare right, with
the dogma of the surplus as the only (illusory) basis of legitimation.

34 Cited in Gregorio Iriarte, Sindicalismo campesino: Ayer, hoy y mañana (La

Paz, CIPCA, 1980), p. 15.
35 Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘La expansión del latifundio en el Altiplano boliviano’,
pp. 95-118.
224 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

In describing this landscape we are inclined towards the usual irony

with which one views the past, because those who came before us
always seem so ingenuous. But this should not be exaggerated. It was,
in fact, a successful project. The response on the part of the sub­
merged society was weak, dispossession was a reality, and the sur­
plus, though it did not exist in the promised proportions, did indeed
exist, at least as a general fantasy.
We must distinguish between the moment of the construction
of this ideological foundation and what it becomes once it has been
integrated. Practice qualifies collective hypotheses and terror can be
Kant put into practice, as Merleau-Ponty said. These ideas contained
some contradictions in Moreno or Baptista but we see them fully
developed, with a certain terrible magnificence, in Montes’ actions
and Saavedras or Arguedas’ thought, which is their final form. In the
histories of states, the moment of interpellation tends to have a cer­
tain grandeur, because interpellation is impossible with weak incen­
tives. Only the extreme degree of self-destruction of the peasantry,
the structural impossibility of transforming its ethnic-corporative
demands into a general democratic programme, in other words, the
necessary failure of all backward ultimatumism, can explain the rudi­
m entary character of the utopian moment of the oligarchic state:
there was a sense that all things could be founded ex nihilo. Willkas
project is, in any case, proof of the sterility of the oligarchy as state.
Carranza could have defeated Zapata but he adopted his programme,
although, naturally, in a modified form, because that is the right of
the victor. The liberals wanted to destroy not only Willka but also
his programme and yet this has long survived him. They had not the
faintest notion of the process of assimilation by the state of the
propositions of the social base.
In other words, this state, like all states at the moment of their
constitution, had to make certain choices or undertake a process of
selection. In doing so, it revealed the hollowness of its hegemonic
ambitions. The great agrarian movement nonetheless gave rise to the
elements of a certain hegemonic engagement. As in any such act of
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 225

refoundation, Pando could not prevail without mobilizing the

masses. It was the right moment to do it, since he somewhat inex­
plicably commanded the respect of the Indians. But ultimately he
held his own prejudices dearer.
*

Not all of their thought was so utterly bankrupt. It was Tamayo, cer­
tainly an audacious man whose thought went beyond mere confor­
mity to the era while still its prisoner, who knew that mulitvocality
was a natural feature of all social propositions, that they should be—
and are always—biunivocal, although he expressed this in a discourse
mired in contradictions that end up destroying the logic of his expo­
sition. It is nonetheless instructive to follow the thread of this dis­
course, even if only in the most summary way.
In the first place, a powerful but Manichean reaction against the
social Darwinist dogma that was so prevalent at the time:
If by the manifestation of a moral superiority we understand
that air of gravity with which man faces all the events of his
existence, and a profound sense of justice, and more than
justice, of equality, and still more than equality, of love; if
morality consists in being ones own master and only aban­
doning oneself and ones own interest for love and service
towards ones fellow; if great morality is manifested in the
accentuation of ones personality, without prejudice and
rather to the benefit of others; if it is, somewhat more pre­
cisely, the expression of certain general virtues, such as
working from the time one is able and until one can work
no longer, moderation and observance of customs and the
translation of this into an orderly bodily health; absence of
all radical evil, truthfulness, gravity, absence of all spirit of
mockery, gentleness as a general condition, humanity and
harmlessness, and, along with this, as intellectual qualities,
simplicity, rectitude, precision and moderation; if all this is
a manifestation of moral superiority, no one possesses such
226 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

superiority to a greater degree than the Indian of whom we

speak.36
The consequence of this was a centrality of the Indian, which
was like an inverted social Darwinism: ‘The foundation of all supe­
rior morality is in a real physical superiority; in this sense, what is
most moral, what is strongest in Bolivia is the Indian; then the mes­
tizo, because of his Indian blood, and lastly the white man.’37
It was the resurrection of pan-Aymarism, an indigenism that we
insist is too reductive. Tamayo, however, in attempting to put his
exultant messianism into positivist syllogisms, unwittingly founded
a whole school of thought: the entire subsequent Aymarist discourse
—Katarism—consists in believing in oneself and this is ethnocentric,
although its justifications were not. To be Aymara, however, implies
universality, that is, to embody symbolically the persecuted of the
earth in a carnality of the here and now. But one cannot logically be
simultaneously Aymara and gamonal. All of Tamayo, but especially
his formidable sociological pamphlet on the society of La Paz, makes
a double tribute to the seigneurial and the indigenous core of the
national, which could only end in a kind of mystification or decom­
position of his thought. It is not easy, however, to convey a conceptual
contradiction of such magnitude with such eloquence, fervour and
consistency. As a landowner himself and even as a direct heir of
Melgarejismo, Tamayo of course could not see the Indians as any­
thing but born labourers. Nor did such radical protests impede him
from praising Montes himself, whereby he revealed himself, in a way,
as no more than an enfant terrible of this, of Montismo. A great
personality, however, transcends its own caprices, and this is clearly
the case with Tamayo, in whose discourse on the country we find
certain lines that are indispensable for our understanding of the
subject.

36 Tamayo, Creación de la pedagogía nacional, chap . 34.

37 Ibid.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 227

Tamayo proposes to imitate the spirit of the Japanese example

when the Meiji Restoration was in process, that is, very early on.
Japan, in his view, had obtained in the first place a stark and disen­
chanted objective vision of the world: ‘It is evident that what lives
most intensely in the world is Europe.’38
But Japan is not overwhelmed by this knowledge; on the con­
trary, it sets out to capture ‘all the objective, external elements of
European life.’ ‘Only fools speak of the Europeanization of Japan.’39
Tamayo then invokes the distinction between culture and civiliza­
tion, so in vogue especially among the Germans: ‘In Japan there is a
European civilization: but the whole culture, its soul and substance,
is Japanese.’40
Translating this into other terms, we can affirm that there is here
a clear idea that being is being in the world and that, conversely, only
in the world (in one’s mode of exchange with the world, which is
civilization, the currency of this market) is one oneself (one’s own
culture). Against a class and an atmosphere that lack that kind of
sentiment and presentiment, Tamayo’s call for self-determination or
for what he called a ‘national pedagogy’ remains the most categorical
historical manifesto of these principles. Its limitations, however, were
obvious. Tamayo resembled Fichte but Montes was no Bismarck.
One could ask, for example, why Patiño was able to succeed
in the world despite the fact that his ‘soul and substance’ were not
Bolivian. The ability to appropriate the technology of the world was
comparable in the two cases but not the cultural—or sp iritu al-
sensibility with which this was achieved or, rather, not their national
accumulation. Tamayo, in the tremendous muddle of his thought,
lacked the objective class position necessary to understand the deci­
sive relation between self-determination and democracy.

38 Ibid., chap . 8.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
228 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

There is certainly a demagogic Tamayo, in Unamunos sense (a

pedagogue of peoples). The fundamentalist or millenarian aspect of
his discourse today serves interests that he surely would not have
shared, because he was conceptually torn. Tamayo, contradicting
himself, nonetheless proposes a principle that, in our view, is abso­
lutely central to the analysis of the national question in Bolivia: that
of human interaction in its development, certainly the most intelli­
gent and profound thesis of this exceptional text:
And at this point in our study of the national character we
necessarily encounter another factor that is definitive for
many sociologists, and we too, with certain reservations, are
inclined to hold it as such. This factor is the environment,
And the environment is the land, to use a less dryly scientific
term. Man is made by the land.41
The environment or atmosphere of the social—this much is
recuperable. The land itself, of which we have already spoken, is a
very significant element here. But the land, as modified land, is the
modification of the land and not the land itself, even if the land has
determined its modification. In Tamayo, it is not a question of a mere
reduction to geography but of the necessary interaction, which is
already the condition of a local form of intersubjectivity:
In speaking of the national character, American whites,
mestizos, and Indians all have two powerful factors in
common: our history and our environment. [ . . . ] Our com­
mon land and permanent coexistence are two forces
that work ceaselessly in the same direction despite the resis­
tance of the exotic races and the historical oppression of
the autochthonous races. The human species can exhibit
deviations, strange modifications, diverse tendencies, etc. It
matters little; an anonymous and powerful will emerges
from the land and in it there is a confluence of all human
currents: volitional, intellectual and emotional. And this is

41 Ibid., chap. 43.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 229

the true meaning of nations [ . . . ] . Men sometimes fail to

grasp this, and worse, sometimes a delusion, a false inter­
pretation of their own history, an inherited prejudice, blinds
them to the true meaning of their life, and this is a hindrance
to history and an obstacle to life. Thus, the white man
among us, implicitly or explicitly, imagines himself to be at
an immense distance from our Indian; and not only does he
imagine this but, on this false premise, he indeed harbours
no feeling but of contempt for the Indian or, in the best of
cases, indifference. He does not see that between him and
the Indian there is much less distance than between him and
the white man of Europe [ . . . ] . In America, there are no
whites, at least not in the strictly European sense.42
These arguments belong to the best strain of our essayistic dis­
course, which is to a great extent (as the novel would later become)
the chosen genre in America. Tamayo could not have read Murra or
Choy (who certainly had read Tamayo), he despised Rousseau for no
apparent reason and read Schopenhauer seriously and Nietzche
rather literarily. But the question of the land, whether as the originary
scene of ideology, the agrarian question itself (for example, in the
characteristic dichotomy of productive ‘persistence and the preda­
tory but not incorporative style of the landholder or, more generally,
of the extractor of the surplus and the society of the landholders), or
the very logic of spatial belonging or the unrenouceability of space,
are elements present in Creación de la pedagogía nacional of an indis­
putable validity today. The recognition of the effects of premercantile
or protomercantile intersubjectivity in the general development of a
common identity is no doubt a very advanced intuition regarding
the production of the self-consciousness of this society.
Tamayo intuited or remembered, in the Platonic sense, another
aspect of the general state of fluidity that had occurred recently in
Bolivia, with the emergence of the indigenous masses and the

42 Ibid, chap . 44.

230 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

conflict around what we have been calling the axis or equation. He

found that in the very body of interdiscursivity or psychological
activity of the environment (which here should not be understood
as mere geography) it was necessary to determine what the axis of
interpellation would be. In his view, this unquestionably had to be
the indigenous: ‘The two fundamental features of our national
character are persistence and resistance. [ . . . ] The main root of our
nationality is necessarily formed in every way by the indigenous
blood which, as we have seen, is the true reservoir of national
energy.’43
The conjunction of the principle of intersubjectivity and this,
which is an interpellation from the indigenous pole, invites a new
reading of this programme, although it is of course a deductive
reading. We must differentiate between utopia and illusion. Men who
do not organize utopias do not truly exist, while illusions are often
merely an escape from existence. It is not easy, moreover, to turn a
feeling of contempt into a programme. The officially or ideally
Hispanic caste had always failed in Bolivia in the embittered illusion
o f a Europeanization of society, perhaps because it referred to a
Europe that had ceased to exist. Even if we presume that such a pro­
gramme might have admitted a syncretic existence, this would only
have been possible with a significant degree of ethico-state absorp­
tion of the propositions of the Indian masses, that is, with a hege­
monic and not cultural-genocidal or fetishistic project. The current
millenarian movements certainly take up and develop the centrality
o f the indigenous that Tamayo proposed and in their good sense they
proclaim the right of every recognizable body (and here we speak of
a considerable portion of the social entity) to qualify the terms on
which equality must occur, that is, the right to formulate interpella-
tive propositions.
It is with Pando that the possibility of a modern state collapsed,
because an opening or fluidity of the masses had come about and

43 Ibid., ch ap . 48.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 231

was closed to him at the level of the quotidian. Pando chose to serve
his savage dogmas and to pay slavish tribute to ill-conceived ideas
rather than to take on the national programme that was latent in the
form of the rebellion; he sanctioned the legal exile of the Indians,
who, moreover, had risen up in his name. Such a mobilization of sup­
port for Pando had its own meanings. It is true that even in the
decade of 1910-20 his name maintained a certain resonance among
the Aymara. It was nonetheless tragic that the Indians themselves
invoked a man with such nefarious racist ideas, which means,
frankly, that in their perplexity, they themselves still harboured the
seeds of their own servitude. That is, they lacked information. With­
out this, they could not win.
The cast of leading characters of that era was of course radically
incapable of discerning such glimmers of analytic greatness in
Tamayo. He himself, moreover, acted for that society, filled his poetry
with marvellous elements and gushed the imperiousness of a facile
erudition to the point of disgust, and ended up shut up in a room
for decades. To a considerable extent, the comfortable superiority
that he enjoyed over the men of his time led him to lose all self­
perspective and distorted him. The ultranationalist military regime
of the 40s republished his essays, but they reformed neither the soci­
ety of the time nor their own institution in accordance with them
and, in general, instead of discerning the transformative lines of this
thought, they made Tamayo into one more household god.
*

We could say that originary accumulation, which leads to the con­

struction of the generalized market, is also a constitutive moment of
the nation in the capitalist sense. It is not, of course, the only possible
constitutive moment, nor, as we have seen, is the capitalist form the
only possible national form. It is also clearly possible to imagine a
process of originary accumulation without a national orientation
in its discourse, that is, not all originary accumulation produces a
nation. The expansion of the seigneurial land regime and the triumph
 232 # RENS ZAVALETA MERCADO

of free trade at the level of the state certainly amounted to such a

moment of accumulation. In this process there was, then, a conflict
between different axes of proposition and interpellation, and Willkas
defeat surely expressed by contrast the fully developed form of the
non-national character that defined the period. In the confrontation
between the endogenous forces of the ‘moral economy’ of commu­
nitarian resistance and the primitive protectionism of the artisans
and the exogenous forces of the silver boom and Chilean interests,
the latter prevailed. The truth is that neither the popular demands,
at once extremist and conservative (because they proposed nothing
but the complete restoration of the indigenous community), nor the
intellectual expression of the oligarchic victory fulfilled the basic con­
ditions of a national-bourgeois solution to the contingencies of the
class struggle, that they offered a simple, reactionary solution. There
was, as we have seen, a vanguardist and exclusionary programme
within a kind of eternal return of the masses that struggled fero­
ciously for amorphous objectives and a seigneurial one that up to
that point had always succeeded in reconstructing spaces for its own
repetition or persistence. In the long run, as will also occur in this
phase, both failed because an elite programme that does not ulti­
mately succeed in seducing or including the masses is insubstantial.
A mass programme that is not viable, that is, fully national or col­
lective, in turn, inevitably provokes a reactionary response.
The consequence of this limited resolution of the problem was
the mentality of the miners, that is, of the flesh-and-blood bour­
geoisie, who put into practice these theories that were in turn the
expression of a social process.
*

Let us see in a summary manner some of the elements of the fasci­

nating history of the tin mines. Production went from 1000 tons per
year in 1890 to 3,500 in 1899 and 15,000 in 1905.44 In 1929 it reached

44 Herbert S. Klein, ‘The Creation of the Patino Tin Empire’, Inter-American

Economic Affairs 19(2) (1965): 7.

1
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 233

48,000 tons. Exports rose from 20,014,100 Bolivian pesos in 1895 to

93,721,800 in 1913.
Leaving aside the loss of the great surplus of the nitrate fields
and copper mines of the coast, if we consider that during many
decades Bolivia had effectively disappeared from the world market
or barely participated in it, its clear that, in relation to the life that
had been organized in those conditions, here two new surpluses
worth taking into account had been produced, that of the second sil­
ver boom and that of the tin mines. This is in addition to that
produced by the rubber industry, which was not insignificant. So
the problem to be addressed is not the absence of a surplus but the
capacity for its local metabolization or assimilation. This was of
course non-existent.
The Huanchaca mine set a precedent that would be repeated. In
1885, for example, while the state revenue was just over 4 million
pesos, Huanchaca alone made 5 million for its shareholders.
Moreover, in the context of Bolivia’s virtual non-existence in the
world market, Huanchaca came to produce 850,000 marks of silver
and paid 40 per cent per annum to its shareholders in dividends.
Since the export rights were 0.08 Bolivian pesos per mark, of course
nothing was left and it was as if it had never existed.
The same can be said after the rubber boom, which between
1906 and 1911 came to represent 20 per cent of Bolivian exports.
The history of the tin mines is no different. Between 1900 and
1920, exports totalled 1,023,329,090 Bolivian pesos, of which the
state retained 48,026,040, or less than 5 per cent. The former liberal
minister of finance Edmundo Vasquez calculated that in a single
decade, from 1920 to 1930, exports totalled 2,660,000,000 Bolivian
pesos but, as Vasquez said, ‘this capital has not been reinvested in
the country’.45 Meanwhile, ‘while the national revenue during the
entire term of the liberal administration did not surpass 31,000,000

45 Albarracín Millán, El poder minero en la administración liberal, p. 164.

234 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

[Bolivian pesos], until 1920 La Salvadora [Patiño’s main mine] alone

was valued at 2,000,000,000 bolivianos.’46
Until 1952, the year they were nationalized, Bolivian mines pro­
duced 300,000 tons of tin.
In 1902, Pando introduced an extremely modest tax of 3 per cent
on net profits. In 1904, according to the Report of the Finance Com­
mittee of the Chamber of Deputies, only two companies, Abelli and
the Quechisla Mining Company, paid this tax. The former paid
583,077 Bolivian pesos and the latter 861,540. Disobedience on the
part of the Indians was harshly punished; in this case, incompliance
had no consequence but the expiration of the law because it had
‘fallen into disuse’: ‘The law of 13 December 1902 fell into disuse*
and ‘as of 1905, none of the companies paid the tax’.47
The same thing happened with the other minerals. With a cer­
tain degree of naivety, Montes, who felt that he had nothing to do
with it, wrote in his 1914 report to Congress: ‘The antimony exported
for a value of 17 million Bolivian pesos has not left a single cent in
taxes [and Montes’ minister of finance, Darío Gutiérrez, would say
in 1918 that] the fiscal yield on antimony exports was zero, because
no export tax is levied!48
If we compare this figure with the national budget, which did
not exceed 16 million pesos in the same year, it would be fair to
protest that ‘the direct export of 17 million pesos, with no duties of
any kind, could not be conceived as anything but outright plunder’.49
General Montes’ indifference did not stop there and the same
report added: ‘We must add that the same applies to lead and zinc,
which are exported duty-free.’50

46 Ibid., p. 319.
47 Ibid., p.159.
48 Cited in ibid., pp. 161-2. [Zavaletas emphasis.]
49 Ibid., p. 162.
50 Cited in ibid., p. 163.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 235

As for wolfram, of which Bolivia was the worlds primary pro­

ducer, 97,000 Bolivian pesos were left in the country of 5,600,000 in
exports. This, however, was considered a miracle’.
Vásquez had said that all profits from exports up until 1930 were
‘distributed to foreign shareholders’,51 a claim that was corroborated
by Montes himself, according to whom ‘98 per cent of the mining
companies, whose shareholders pay tax on dividends, were foreign­
ers and collected their dividends outside the country.’52
The last president of the liberal era, José Gutiérrez Guerra,
attempted to tax mineral exports and it is entirely possible that this
was the immediate cause that brought this era to a close:
Between 1900 and 1920, during two decades of mineral
exports, the percentage of customs duties was almost invari­
able, fluctuating between 3 per cent and 3.4 per cent [ . . . ]
Taxes were not levied on tin profits, nor did any other kind
of tax apply, because the only tax law, instituted in 1902, was
not observed; on the rest of the mineral wealth, including
antimony, no taxes were levied, not even customs. Copper,
sliver and gold were constantly exempted of export duties
through express ministerial orders.53
This means, quite simply, that there was no retention of the sur­
plus. Let us leave aside the basic ineptitude in the defence of greatest
surplus after Potosí, which was the surrender of the nitrate fields and
the copper mines. The fetishization of the surplus was so extreme
that the absurdity was committed of sacrificing a large existing
surplus—that of the nitrate fields—for the prospect of a future sur­
plus. The model, therefore, was Chile but only because of a patho­
logical Chile-philia—Chile as appendix or partner of the British and
not the Chile that had coveted and conquered a surplus. This is what
Montismo did with this so central element of its conception of the

51 Cited in ibid., p. 164.

52 Cited in ibid.
53 Ibid., pp. 120-1.
236 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

world, with its philosophers stone. If by surplus we mean access to

resources that do not merely reproduce the previous levels but exceed
them, that is, a favourable change in the means of social reproduc­
tion, it was unquestionable that Bolivia had embarked upon a new
era in terms of its surplus. The men of the oligarchy squandered it
with an unfathomable insouciance.
This refers not only to Bolivia’s loss of a million square kilome­
ters between 1889 and 1909, which was serious above all because of
the acquiescent manner in which the loss was born. It was not just a
case of simple defeatism in the sense of not believing in what was
officially theirs. It was something more that this. We could say that
every state programme has a territorial feeling as part of its concep­
tion of things. These are relations that are not always conscious.
Moreno, for example, as a member of this state, at the hour of his
death felt the grief of seeing Bolivia transformed into a mining fac­
tory; it was, however, too late even for regret because the gamonal
conception of the territory of the state was only the extension of the
destruction of its human wealth, whose origin was the racial chau­
vinism of which Moreno himself had been a prophet.
These feelings were applied outwardly as well as inwardly, and
what happened with the railway network is of a terrible eloquence.
The sale of territory (because the peace treaties with Chile and Brazil
were nothing more or less than this) translated into an investment
in a kind of infrastructure based on the Sisson Report. They gave rise
to the network called Speyer-Montes, designed for no purpose at all
but to serve the mining industry, as Sisson himself acknowledged.54
On the remains of the derailed prior internal market, which was a
residue of the nucleus of Potosí, which had collapsed for all practical
purposes with Belzus artisans and Willkas comunarios, since the par­
ticipation o f the regions was interrupted, a new, shrunken internal
market, if it can be called this, was constructed, circumscribed to the

54 W. Lee Sisson, Reconnoissance Report upon Proposed System o f Bolivian

Railways (La Paz: Impr. H eitm an y Cornejo, 1905).
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 237

mining districts and a few valleys, Cochabamba in particular. The

foundations of the old protected market (sugarcane, wheat) destroyed,
its breadth was reduced and this affected important regions like Santa
Cruz:
The Cochabamba flour industry slowly disappeared; the
looms and garment industry only made strange things that
not even the Indians wore; the sugar of Santa Cruz was made
into alcohol and was eclipsed by imported liquor from Peru.
If not Chilean, Brazilian, Argentinian and Peruvian, the prod­
ucts that flooded the consumer market were US imports.55
A phenomenon that will only be seen in its full expression when
we discuss the problems of mentality in the conduct of the Chaco
War, that is, the tenacious, inevitable and general slippage towards
an active inconsistency of behaviour, understood as a collective ten­
dency, appears here in its early stages. The lack of coherence, not to
mention of national orientation or self-determination, was expressed
here in the simplest negotiations. For example, despite the fact that
the Speyer contract was like a derivation of the Chilean indemnifi­
cation, that is, that the same thing occurred with the railway as with
the coast, ‘the bankers of the Speyer trust left business in the hands
of The Bolivian Railway Co., which in turn transferred its rights to
the Anglo-Chilean subsidiary, the Antofagasta & Bolivian Railway
Co., moved by the same interests that produced the treaty of 1914.56
The money, acquired at the immense price of territorial dispos­
session, was returned to US and Chilean hands, that is, directly to
the plunderers.
These habits of the state in relation to the territory were also
translated into their internal equivalent, which made up what can be
called the enclave system. Here the tin miners simply inherited prac­
tices instituted by their immediate predecessors. A commission of
the Chamber of Deputies reported in 1900: ‘The Huanchaca com­

55 Albarracín Millán, El poder minero en la administración liberal, p. 329.

56 Ibid., p. 92.
238 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

pany, in a grave offense against the Constitution and the republic,

dictates its will and governs a population of eight thousand souls.’57
The mines and the rubber plantations were preserves closed to
any form of state action. The company was forbidden to pay in
vouchers and to impede trade and freedom of movement among the
population. To little avail: ‘In this area it was impossible to enforce
the law [ . . . ] [because] “the managers of Huanchaca and Pulacayo
named authorities who should administer the towns so that all the
authorities were subordinated to the company’?58
This situation persisted in practice until well into the 1940s. In
any case, Tejada Sorzano, as the liberal minister, certified that in 1919
the system had not changed. He asked: ‘What could the sub-prefects,
intendants or magistrates do against the big companies? They unfor­
tunately had no choice but to submit to the whims of the companies
or leave their dominions.’59
In principle, the explanation for this would be the incapacity for
a bourgeois use of wealth, and this would be the cause of the lack of
will to self-determination exhibited by the state, that is, the social
entity did not assume the desire for either. In those conditions, it is
reasonable to suppose that the same thing that happened with the
second silver boom and the tin mines would have happened with the
nitrate fields and the copper mines, as indeed occurred with Chile.
This will lead us at some point in this exposition to other levels of
analysis. It is remarkable considering that we are speaking of
a country with some measure of mercantile and even capitalist
experience. It is no accident that Patino almost unconsciously
worked out the model that has been called that o f‘cross-mutations’,60
that is, he tended towards the incorporation of technology as if he

57 Cited in ibid., p. 251.

58 Ibid., p. 251.
59 Cited in ibid., p. 272.
60 T. S. A shton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (London: Oxford
U niversity Press, 1948).
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 239

had been born in it and, at the same time, towards the subsumption
of the manager model under traditional forms of exploitation. Patino
was living proof that there were no true cultural obstructions to a
rather comprehensive understanding of the world or of capitalism.
It is evident, on the contrary, that he himself represented a case of
possessive individualism without a nation, that is, it was the nation
or those who assumed the monopoly of its name who lacked such
notions of individuality and possession. The seigneurial elements in
Aramayo or Arce were more important, even if only by osmosis, and
cosmopolitan elements were dominant in Hochschild. The real
leader or corporate caudillo, however, was Patino. This is why we
must ask under what conditions it was possible to perform all the
tasks proper to a bourgeois logic and at the same time to directly
renounce its extension as a national logic. The favourable combina­
tion of low consumption and a relatively high level of adaptation to
advanced technology on the part of the workers, along with the pre­
existence of a certain internal market, seemed to invite a kind of
mimetic effect in the development of capitalism. However, Patino
constituted himself as an exemplar of spurious embourgeoisement
because, bourgeois to the core of his being, he was formally capitalist
but not national. It is in the study of the great figures of the bourgeois
class that we find evidence of the insidious limits of embourgeoise
ment in a formation like the Bolivian. The fact is that it turned out
to be an inhospitable land for it.
Patino, a man from a modest background (although from within
a very particular popular setting, that of Cochabamba, which despite
being a non-industrial subformation was perhaps the oldest and
most distinctly mercantile of Bolivia), acquired the notions that
would take him so far first as an employee of a supply compan)
(Fricke) and later of Huanchaca itself, then the biggest company in
the country. We could say that here certain ideas take hold of him,
such as the particular and subordinate position of Boli\ ia in the
world market, but also the advantages of industrial concentration.
240 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

This is the origin of the deeply rooted fusion of formal subsumption

and exploitation that defines his character as an entrepreneur.
We can perhaps accept [Herbert] Kleins claim that ‘his first
move was the creation of a modern technical administration under
the management of competent European engineers’.61 But there is no
doubt that, in their long relationship, we certainly cannot speak of
an attitude of deference towards the foreign technocrats on Patiños
part. In reality, he subordinated, even psychologically, a vast body of
European and US administrators and engineers to achieve his ends,
which were not those of Bolivia—but not those of the foreigners
either. In this sense, he is an entrepreneur of the classic mould
because he never abandons, from beginning to end, what Marx called
the command of capital. This is significant because the manner in
which real subsumption occurs determines the form of power in cap­
italism and we can perhaps even say that it is the earliest moment of
the foundation of the state. If this did not extend towards society it
was not because of any particular fault of Patiños (although it was
also this) but because of a certain incapacity for absorption on the
part of the social body. The local pre-bourgeoisie, to the modest
extent that it existed, was far from the spirit of command of capital
in any form that would exceed the the purely despotic framework of
originary accumulation.
Patiño had a profound instinct for technology and this would
have extended, in other conditions, towards society. Almost from the
outset he bought a refining mill worth a million dollars, which in his
tim e was a truly considerable investment.
T he mill called Miraflores started working in 1905. With
electric energy and other improvements, La Salvadora
ju m p ed from 10,797 tons in 1904 to a pre-refined produc­
tio n level of 42,409 tons in 1905. In 1910, La Salvadora was
already producing 10 per cent of the worlds tin.62

61 K lein, ‘T h e C reation of the Patiño Tin Empire’, p. 9.

62 Ibid.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 241

This means that the two basic moments, formal subsumption or

the formalization of command, which entails the assimilation of the
new sense of time, and real subsumption, as freedom from the con­
straints of the traditional forces of production, were present in him.
The latter, as we know, is the civilizing moment of the bourgeoisie,
its hour of vitality and substance, and Patiño belonged to it. Carrasco
speaks of his exercise of this aptitude until the end:
When I went up to the Harrison gallery—Patiño writes—I
saw that metal carts were leaving the mine only half full, a
grave error because it wastes material. The palliris63 send
boxes to the foundry and the machinery gets ruined with no
one to oversee it. There are too many workers in the mines,
and there is no control. I am surprised that you have not
noticed this or that, having noticed it, you have have not taken
steps to remedy it ... I must tell you that you are the only one
answerable to me for the lack of order and the lack of com­
pliance on the part of your subordinates in their duties.64
Almaraz narrates another no less eloquent anecdote:
Just before he died, his technicians from Huanuni announced
the that the mine was exhausted. Despite having been absent
for twenty years, he ordered that work be continued in the
site called Boca Grande. He died before the outcome of the
this exploration was known: Huanuni became one of the
richest mines of the group.65
The three big miners, Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo, were
known as the ‘tin barons’. Patiño, however, had not a trace of aristo­
cratic caprice; his temperament was entirely pragmatic. The variation
between some ‘barons’ and others is telling. Hochschild, for example,
is the embodiment of cosmopolitan capital. He himself came to

63 Women who sorted through the minerals retrieved from the mines.
64 Manuel Carrasco, Simón I. Patiño: Un procer industrial (Cochabam ba:
Editorial Canelas, 1964), p. 81.
65 Almaraz, El poder y la caída, p. 31
242 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Bolivia, it is said, with an inheritance of 200,000 pounds sterling and

a doctorate in mining; therefore, his fortune was his doctorate in
action. He was cosmopolitan and he conducted himself as such,
although he was almost killed in the most local manner. His case
could hardly have become paradigmatic. As for Pacheco, Aramayo,
or Arce, if we have said that one can find in them a certain popular
element, far from becoming bourgeois, they became lords and ended
up, as Mitre says, buying manors in Sucre and ranches all over the
country.66 Its true that Arkwright also ended up buying rural land
and properties but he clearly never abandoned a secular and worldly
style. The same can be said of Patino, who was like the personifica­
tion of capital: Pairumani, the ranch he bought in the valley, always
meant little to him and he regarded his non-m ining investments,
including an electric plant in Cochabamba, with a certain disinterest.
He seems to have been a man endowed with a somewhat brutal good
sense in which the impulse of accumulation predominated and not
that of the protestant ethic; a good sense, moreover, that was purely
capitalist, a conception of the world through profit. He believed
in nothing else. His attitude towards the national ideology as well as
the national reality, for example, is clear. While he was not known
to have any religious ideas or convictions of any kind other than
entrepreneurial, he nonetheless realized that it could be useful for
others to believe in nonsense. This explains the fact that Alcides
Arguedas dedicated his Historia de Bolivia to him. He would have
laughed heartily if someone had told him that he was to industry
what Montes was to politics or Arguedas to public opinion because
he did not often notice the existence of his employees nor was he in
interested in their opinions. Still, he did not spurn Arguedas dedi­
cations and he even subscribed to his doctrines to some extent.
The truth is that he saw Bolivia as nothing more than an
exploitable portion of the world, and one that surely he knew better
than anybody else. But he was not only bourgeois in form: he was a

66 See Mitre, Los patriarcas de la plata.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 243

bourgeois-in-the-world. In 1908, he opened his first office in

Hamburg, perhaps influenced by Fricke or perhaps because the
Germans had come to be important purchasers of Bolivian minerals
before the First World War. He believed no more in Germany than
in Bolivia, of course, because it was not his style to admire countries;
that is, if he believed in it, he interrupted his belief when his interests
moved him to do so just as one changes ones clothes. In defending
his most concrete interests, he was capable of doing fierce battle with
the Chilean capitalists, whose plans he frustrated to a large extent
although its clear that by then they and Chile as such were biting off
more than they could chew.
Two moments stand out as proof that he was a man who moved
with a comfortable certainty in the world. First, when he makes an
ally of the US National Lead Company and takes over Williams
Harvey, the British tin foundry that was the largest in the world. Sec­
ond, in his role in the formation of the International Tin Committee
in response to the bust of 1929. By then, of course, between La
Salvadora, Uncía and Llallagua, he controlled 49 per cent of Bolivia’s
tin and 11 per cent of global production. The subsequent expansion
of his business is just the extension of these unerring intuitions about
the world.
That certainty is matched only by the utter lack of patriotism or
the moral indifference with which he regarded his own country,
which can be seen in his relation—common to the entire oligarchy—
to the local labour force and also to the Bolivian state.
The conditions were always atrocious in the ‘mining cemeteries’.
Of Huanchaca, a foreign observer once said: ‘Of the 400 born every
year, about 360 die within three months.’67 In 1909, Lima found that
in Corocoro, ‘75 per cent had developed clearly detectable lesions
in their lungs’.68 Pasley, a British engineer, ‘made it known that the

67 Almaraz, El poder y la caída, p. 21.

68 Cited in Albarracín Millán, El poder minero en la administración liberal,
p. 263.
244 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

transport of minerals from the interior of the mine to the surface was
performed by workers carrying sacks of metal on their backs. These
sacks had a capacity of 75 kilograms and only two trips could be
made’69
Barbier affirmed that ‘The pulverization, the sulphur emissions
from the silver, the handling of minerals made into bars to be sent
to Europe, killed them like flies.’70
It was a labour regime that seemed to indicate that for the com­
panies everything was important except those men. It was, however,
something socially accepted, as was made evident when in 1903 a
law was passed making Sunday a mandatory day of rest for all, with
the exception of the mine workers. The loss of human life through
overexploitation of labour was seen to the end as part of the nature
of things, to the point that Aramayo wrote in his famous Memoran­
dum, which lays out his project for the country: ‘The Bolivian worker,
as a result of his primitive education, does not yet have the same
needs that more advanced peoples have.’71
This has been illustrated, in a descriptive mode, in the observa­
tion that ‘The company [ . . . ] did not hesitate, despite its heavy
investment in machinery and advanced techniques, to employ
women and children above ground in sorting metals and other tasks
which required extensive labour [ . . . ],’72
All this is only to say that then and much earlier the exploitation
of the labour force was an established custom. Indeed, the mining
industry only continued the Spanish tradition of extermination
through work, which is a systematic practice that persists to this day
and is incorporated into the everyday life of this society.
*

69 Cited in ibid., p. 237.

70 Cited in ibid., p. 239.
71 Cited in Almaraz, El podery la caida, p. 106.
72 Klein, ‘The Creation of the Patino Tin Empire’, p. 18.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 245

There is a problematic knot that we can call the aporia of Patino. The
sordid and dense enigma of his trajectory has generally been
explained either as the product of a singular personality or as a result
of the call of the world market. When the world needed tin, it pro­
duced Patino, etc. These elements of course figure in the process of
the enigma but they do not totally resolve it. Hochschild is an exam­
ple of the world coming not to Bolivia but to its tin. And to inherit a
fortune as Aramayo did is not the same thing as to make one. Patino
was at once local, because he was formed here, and contemporary,
that is, originary.
We should perhaps take into account the problems of a mentality
proper to an outwardly oriented economy. The very capacity for par­
ticipation in the world market is conditioned by the level of consol­
idation of the nation-state, which means that it is dangerous to
become essentially a part of the world before becoming a nation. This
kind of extroversion not only deforms the internal congruence of the
economy but also defines the ideological belonging or loyalty of the
bourgeoisie, even if it has developed locally. It is a complex problem
because exportation deforms, and at the same time the notion of
existence outside of the world is chimeric. On the other hand, a class
is always the class plus its culture or environment, which exceeds it.
Patino, as we have seen, as an individual was a man of a wholly bour­
geois character. He introduced technical innovations at the global
level, such as Patino motors, and he succeeded in transnationalizing
himself in an unorthodox manner, that is, from the periphery to the
centre. He was undoubtedly the dominant figure of the era, entirely
without peer; having assumed such perfect mastery over the country,
it would have seemed logical that he would reconstruct it in his image.
For some reason, such a dissemination of the capitalist spirit did not
occur and Patino himself seemed to share the logic of exclusion and
non-incorporation that was proper to the ruling class. He achieved
only a weak and instrumental unification of the dominant bloc, which
would inevitably lead to its collapse. As for self-determination, not
only was no such thing attempted but it was never given a thought
246 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

either—on the contrary, it was strictly impeded, as the history of the

foundry ovens shows.
The question of why Patiños programme, which involved the
entire economic cycle of the mining industry and its corporate inte­
gration but not an ideologico-institutional transformation, was inter­
rupted at the very point at which it became strategic for the country
and for his own class warrants a few more precise hypotheses. It is a
problem that has to do with the democratic (or undemocratic) skele­
ton of the social. The assimilation of free labour in formal subsump­
tion need not occur in a purely despotic manner and, in any case,
that act of subjection is limited by the free man himself. The power
of this moment lies in the democratic infusion of the productive
moment as an objective factor, that is, democracy as a force of pro­
duction, residing in the essence of the act of production and not
merely a superstructural reflection of it. It is (in effect) a moral-
historical element because the morality of history (which is the propo­
sition of freedom) qualifies the mode of participation in the historical
horizon. As to real subsumption or the technological principle,
which is already the highest moment of the reform of production, it
is largely an inextricable relation between freedom and the state. Of
the state, insofar as it entails the principle of totalization, which is the
ultimate result of concentration plus the advent of the new sense of
temporality. Of freedom, because the total worker is its mass force and
a necessary condition of real subsumption. To believe that the culmi­
nating moment of this process (the machine in production) can be
achieved without producing its social base (totalization, determined
by the degree of democratization), sooner or later, leads this base to
cripple or paralyse its false expression. Patiños motors in the end
were useless because the workers rebelled against Patiño.
Patiño, therefore, aptly expressed the schizophrenia of this
formation. There was an unresolved conflict between his tortured
impatience to incorporate himself into the world, a result of the
amputation of the Pacific coast and an obsession with the surplus,
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 247

and a resolve not to alter the terms of the internal class relations and
even to undertake their reactionary reform. Patiño, then, as the most
advanced stage of this bloc, wanted to combine real subsumption
with the massive exploitation of labour power.
This, as a discursive model, was tenacious and even successful
in its final expression but it lacked long-term viability. Ultimately,
there are only two ways to build structures of self-determination.
The first, which we have already cited, is through the receptivity that
ensues from democratic concentration. The second is the authori­
tarian form or the method of negative hegemony. For this to occur
there must be a kind of absolute victory, implacable and prolonged,
to create the foundation that receives the authoritarian command;
but, also, a coherent continuity of authoritarian rule because at a cer­
tain moment this indefinite over-domination turns on the one
charged with exercising it. This form, therefore, requires a state like
the one imagined by Hegel, a state with an ultimate internal certainty.
The project derived from Pat iños process suggests that an authori­
tarian route was sought that would submit labour to exploitation by
both capital and the state. The core of its inviability was, however, in
its conception of the state as an instrument of obstruction and
subjugation.
To affirm that Bolivia lacked structures of embourgeoisement
raises the question of latent ideas. In principle, a pioneer is a pioneer
—but he should also be a model. Society should at once produce
him and receive him, transformed, as proof of its potential. Patiños
ideas, applied to politics, did not make the Patiñist state more
powerful. This was because he only gathered together latent ideas
with his power. The structures of embourgeoisement or the social­
ization of bourgeois ideals, the ideologeme transformed into a pop­
ular myth, must be preceded by or simultaneous with intellectual
reform. Instead, in that Bolivia what had taken place was a popular
movement that clung, rightly or wrongly, to archaic forms of its con­
stitution that were nonetheless capable of laying siege in a fierce (and
248 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

we would add, counterproductive) way to the whole of the ruling

class and its fringe. The latter, in turn, too attached to a simplified
version of the Chilean model, could not help but embrace social
Darwinism, which came to represent the ex-post rationalization of
something that had already happened. The complicity of the great
minds of the country, in proportion to their talent, is clear.
*

In that kind of involuntary omnipresence, Patiño was also the cause

of a grave deformation in the development of the state. In 1899,
Patiño held a mysterious meeting with Pando. This was just shortly
before the violent action with which Patiño, ‘with Indians and armed
men, took La Salvadora never to relinquish it. This episode repre­
sented the beginning of the end of Anglo-Chilean economic expan­
sionism, which then had very concrete designs. It is also, however, a
significant event for other reasons. The miners, we must say, did not
govern directly and there was indeed a certain political class. Still the
specificity of this state consisted in the subordination of the political
class to what was therefore called the superstate. It is an anecdote
that illustrates the original, essential and definitive subordination of
the oligarchic state to ‘big mining’, a subordination that becomes a
kind of second nature for the politicians, that is, there is an absorp­
tion of sovereignty by the irrefutable apex of that society. It would
be helpful at this point to describe the form in which this was
expressed. For this we turn to the personnel of the establishment*
itself.
Tejada Sorzano, who was Gutiérrez Guerras minister at the time,
describes it best, in 1919:
The power [of the Bolivian state] is increasingly inferior to
that of a group of industrial firms which, as a result of
important interests, have become a political force in the
development of the Bolivian nation [ . . . ] . The phenomenon
consists in that the development of great fortunes does not
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 249

run parallel to the development of public finances; that a

single citizen or a small group of citizens alone has at its dis­
posal greater resources than the entire nation and that the
predominance of their interests increasingly determines an
imbalance in the distribution of the country’s energy, these
interests weighing evermore heavily on the opposite side of
the scale to that of the interests of the nation.73
This was entirely obvious. The modest 30,000 kilowatts gener­
ated in the mines was more energy than that consumed by the rest
of the country together. The capital produced by a single mine (La
Salvadora) in a single year (1920) was equal to 70 times the total rev­
enue of the Bolivian state in 20 years. Under these conditions, things
could not but be as they were.
It is not surprising then that Villazón, a former manager of the
firm, would maintain upon completing his presidential term that ‘We
have concentrated our efforts in protecting the mining industry’. In
his view: ‘The government [ . . . J should be exclusively devoted to
administrative tasks [ . . . ] our fellow citizens cannot and should not
ask for more’ because ‘we have work to do; our task comes down to
that of exportation’.74 The ‘symbolic man’ himself, Salamanca, whose
significance we shall see below, had declared: ‘The miners are not to
be touched.’75
Such official and openly acknowledged supremacy could not but
have immense consequences for the conception of the state, for
example, with regard to its spatial self-conception and even the legit­
imacy or authority of the state in its new space. In Zalles’ opinion,
the mines constitute an independent community that is territorially
coextensive with the Republic’.76 Zalles had been a presidential

73 Cited in Albarracín Millán, El poder minero en la administración liberal,

pp. 335-6.
74 Cited in ibid., pp. 123-4.
75 Cited in ibid., p. 112.
76 Cited in ibid., p. 252.
250 # RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

candidate—we do not know who successfully commanded him to

step down; this he did but said what everyone thought and denounced
an unchecked, omnifarious power within the Liberal Party.77
This translated into specific modalities of the constitution of
power, which abdicated all legitimation eo ipso. Electoral participa­
tion did not exceed 1 per cent of the population and, nonetheless, as
the official organ of Patiñismo, El Diario, acknowledged: ‘In the
political sphere, Simón I. Patiño has control of the province of
Bustillos in the department of Potosí and of Huanumi in the depart­
ment of Oruro, a decisive control certain to tilt the balance towards
the side to which he inclines’, and therefore, ‘Patiño [ . . . ] no longer
holds only the economic centre of the country, but extensive control
of the electoral activity of the nation.’78
Extraterritoriality of the enclaves, the literal exclusion of the pop­
ulation in the constitution of power, and direct control of the elec­
torate that was left. On top of this, considering that the intellectual
who had been proclaimed ‘the teacher of youth’, Daniel Sánchez
Bustamante, had said, ‘A ttracting the interest of the Yankee is our
prim ary task’,79 it seemed entirely natural that the xenophilia of
that atmosphere would pride itself on its consummate appeasement.
An American even occupied the post of minister of mines and
petroleum for several years. A Frenchman, Jaques Sever, was chief
of the general staff from 1905 to 1909 and the German Hans Kundt
occupied the same post in 1910. He would go on to lead a crucial
part of the Chaco campaign. Even education was organized under
the leadership of a Belgian mission and the Kemmerer mission
reshaped the country’s fiscal policy with absolute authority. Not to
mention the terrible affair of the loans that gave rise to Margaret

77 Cited in ibid., p. 221.

78 Cited in ibid., pp. 191-2.
79 See Conrado Ríos Gallardo, Después de la p a z . . . : Las relaciones chileno-
bolivianas (Santiago: Imp. Universitaria, 1926), p. 317.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 251

Marshs classic account, The Bankers in Bolivia.60 Such acts of appease­

ment cost Bolivia dearly, as we shall see.
In discussing the crisis of the oligarchic structure, we must con­
sider the conditions under which a society is capable of producing
relative objectivity in the form of shared cognitive premises or crite­
ria of valorization. In a way, we could say that those who need self-
knowledge most, the countries that must face history in an already
deteriorated state, are least able to acquire the necessary conditions
to do so. If Zarate, Belzu or Patino himself—who (in their way)
advanced propositions that in principle contained realizable elements
(that could be made real) of a social project—had constructed inter­
mediate spaces, they would have thereby modified the oligarchic
political society. This, in turn, would necessarily have existed with a
less spurious independence than that which it assumed. It is a series
of successive ruptures. Not even the most successful personal and
entrepreneurial bourgeois experiments, like Patinos, included a pro­
ject of intellectual reform within their horizon, that is, their fortunes
were capitalist but their invisible beliefs were not and they were in
no way prepared to contribute anything to the formation of the state.
In their very character, they were individual capitalists who rejected
from the first the idea of the general capitalist. On the other hand,
the intellectuals turned out to be all too organic in relation to the
proclamation of an absolute victory over the Indians. Enamoured of
their own prejudices, they did not for an instant abandon them; they
made them into the units of a general structure of thought (which
was a compendium of abject chimeras) and nothing of this had the
slightest potential of becoming a national programme, which, more­
over, would have supposed certain minimal democratic elements,
that is, from the outset, the gradual substitution of a mode of life.
But men do not replace their mode of life—they develop it or they
die for it. They were operating under impossible premises. They80

80 Margaret Alexander Marsh, The Bankers in Bolivia: A Study in American

Foreign Investment (New York: Vanguard Press, 1928).
• RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

wanted something like a bourgeois state without capitalist ideas. In

a Jeremian apotheosis, they lamented their national inferiority but
no one ever proposed the elimination of the efficient cause, which
was inequality.
The form of politics has real consequences. In other words, we
tend to think that things can be expressed in different ways but, in
reality, they have a single necessary expression and thus we come to
the problem of the necessary forms of politics. Iconic power and a
denial of reality are constitutive of the present form of this state
system. It was a society that replaced every project of effective homo­
geneity with an illusory homogeneity, through the legal anathemati­
zation of the Indians. It was what is called an act of suppression: since
history had unfolded unfavourably, history did not exist; it was
replaced by an irrational optimism.
This is what occurred with the flesh-and-blood men of the foun­
dation of the oligarchy, that is, with its intellectual sources and the
founders of its lineage. Let us see now what happened with its first
actors, who were already only the figureheads of that founding. The
volatile logic of this state itself led to a non-rationality in the consti­
tution of power and to its charismatic or ritual legitimation. It should
not be assumed that this assertion necessarily rests on premises that
favour a rational-bourgeois constitution or reiterable rationality and
a bureaucratic-transpersonal nomination of its organs. Clearly, even
a power that is non-rational in its routine operation and in quanti­
tative terms can have an unquestioned validity. Belzu was not directly
elected but no one was as popular as he. On the other hand, charis­
matic election is proper to prophetic forms and of course today no
one would deny the validity of millenarian forms of legitimation. In
this case, however, there was a restriction to the interregional logic
of the lords, that is, the lords after Willka, intoxicated with the power
of their monopoly.
In its very nature, this power bloc, the miners and landholders
(not only the latifundistas, and this is important, because even a
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 253

small plot of land signalled the assumption of lordship—hence the

Melgarejist hunger for all land and not just productive land), could
believe neither deeply nor superficially in what is called representa­
tive democracy, that is, in the logic that supposes that where there is
one man there must be one vote. This itself is not the culmination of
democracy but its formal principle; at best it is a poor expression of
the democratic essentialism of Rousseau or Paine. Through a mental
act that transformed Montesquieu s system into Rojas' Candidacy or
huayraleva81 democracy, this system expressed with great factual elo­
quence what was inherent in the structure of the Bolivia that
emerged from the Federal Revolution. For all political purposes, it
was a country that had resolved to exist without the vanquished and
that further declared the political monopoly of the victors through
restricted suffrage in a way that is only comparable to the American
South or to South Africa today. In certain sociological conceptions
of politics as a white-collar privilege, it is an idea that is still alive
today. If it's true that one does not think beyond what the available
concepts of ones society allow one to think, this society could not
imagine democracy except in Rojas’ terms. This proves its incongru­
ence because the fraudulent constitution of power cannot but lead
to powers not knowing what its made of; it is not something that
only has consequences for the oppressed and it is, therefore, above
ail a form of self-deception. What is absurd about this caucus is that
it was accountable only to itself, but its true excess lay in that it still
aspired to a charismatic appeal. It was, therefore, a state that could
not exist without its own weakness. The forms of its debility guar­
anteed its own precarious existence and it was, in short, a rosea, that
is, a vicious circle.
In accordance with its own tradition, its particular style, this
society tended towards grace and not virtue, towards bouts of excess

81 [Local pejorative term for a member of the elite; Augusto Céspedes uses
the phrase huayraleva democracy to refer to electoral democracy restricted to
a very narrow political class.]
254 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

and not historical process. Its life is like a never-ending party where
bad news is not admitted. Perhaps for this reason, the political phase
now before us, on the contrary, is characterized by the stubborn
attempt to establish the criterion of exemplarity over processual logic
in the explanation of events. The project was crude in its essence
because it was based on the political annihilation of the masses, but
it aspired to construct a closed political society that believed in a kind
of reinvention of history, a heroic history constructed almost without
heroes because what heroes there were were elsewhere, their names
unknown.
Salamanca inherited the paradigm of the ‘symbolic man from
Linares. It is a process full of feelings of inexplicability or disorienta­
tion. The oligarchic society had squandered one opportunity for
charismatic leadership after another, although certainly, instinctively,
it sought them without end; the pursuit of a charismatic solution to
the unresolved problem of the legitimacy of power is only natural
where the principle of the rational legitimation of power has been
abdicated.
If we adhere to the descriptions offered by Saavedra’s few biog­
raphers, we must believe that his intellectual horizon was more con­
tem porary than Tamayos. Siles himself, although he was on the
fringes of the rosea gentry, with a conventional training as a Charcas
attorney, was a man with a certain intellectual dignity. Both, however,
stand out as peaks on an otherwise flat landscape. It was a society
obsessed with mere appearances, a collective case of submerged con­
sciousness. It was Montes who, through sheer noise, showered this
political society with his paralogy because, with his formidable
euphoria directed primarily towards itself, with his innate sense of
boundless self-satisfaction, he belonged to an environment enam­
oured of this, of an optimism that issued from the fervour for the
surplus.
The surplus, however, came, existed in some small measure and
vanished immediately. Then the ‘symbolic man emerged, ‘the most
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES * 255

meditative and coldest of the Bolivian politicians and also the most
distinguished’, with an ‘intelligence [that] was self-sufficient without
any kind of intercourse with new ideas’, according to Céspedes’ mag­
nificent observation.82
It seemed that this society had finally reached its objective. With
‘the simplicity of his oratory, precise and eloquent, rare in those times
in its lack of rhetorical excess’,83 Salamanca’s sobriety, which was like
a kind of inertia, however, came too late because it was impossible
for the system and it was, in any case, accompanied by an illusory
vision of the world that was of the greatest significance. And so, when
the ‘symbolic man’ appeared, it was said that the misfortunes of the
nation had come to an end.
In the following pages, we will see to what point Salamanca’s
ideas about Bolivia corresponded to the radical falsity proper to his
class position: he himself, as a landholder, entirely seigneurial yet a
mestizo, had Indians but could not see them. Even in his disheart­
ened vision of a man given over to death from the beginning, he was
confined by a social blindness in the style of Candide, a general
optimism that explains how Bolivia could follow him into a hopeless
venture like that of the Gran Chaco. Here indeed an entire state
organized its own defeat. In this more general sense, if in the micro­
history of the oligarchic state Montes means something different
from Saavedra or Salamanca from Siles, they all nonetheless merely
constitute different moments in the process of a state that would run
its course. We are not particularly interested in this discussion or in
the banal internal history of oligarchic democracy between republi­
cans and liberals but, rather, in its role in determining subsequent
events and above all in the apocalyptic ordeal that was the Chaco
War. None of them, in the end, figures as more than a straggling

82 Augusto Céspedes, Salamanca o El metafísico delfracaso (La Paz: Juventud,

1973), pp. 15, 19.
83 Ibid., p. 18.
256 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

piper in a parade of disaster and disgrace. In this catastrophe, the

essence of its epitasis can be read.
*

War, according to Clausewitz, ‘is [ . . . ] closer to politics which, in

turn, may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale’.84 It
seems to us that here Clausewitz establishes an apt comparison
between the essence or spirit behind each of these three forms of
interaction. A war is, in effect, a crisis and, as such, has an unusual
and extraordinary effect of trans-subjectivity. Politics and commerce,
in turn, have the same content but in a perennial way. This proposi­
tion serves as the basis on which we can advance a hypothesis.
Indeed, we know the limitations of a theoretical reduction of the
national question to its mercantile desideratum. Reality itself suggests
that there have been nonmercantile or premercantile forms of
nationalization. In fact, politics is the commerce of power, war is the
crisis of politics and politics is the distribution of crisis while war is
the violence of commerce. All of these are forms of communication
between men. In the Bolivian case, this great mobilization, which
moreover entailed a significant death toll that is socially productive,
if we can say this in these terms, was one of the elements, and perhaps
the most important, in the constitution of the multitude, which is to
say, we are speaking of an important indirect form of institution of
the national. The Chaco mobilization was the pathetic revival of the
elements of unification that had existed with the Potosí market and
its consequences for the masses, such as the Amaru uprising.85

84 Karl von Clausewitz, On War (Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret trans)
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 75.
85 The following paragraphs are from Zavaletas Consideraciones generales
sobre la historia de Bolivia, 1932-71 (1977), available in Zavaleta Mercado,
Obra Completa, vol. 2, pp. 35-96.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 257

Love, power, war—these are the true elements of life. It was in

the Gran Chaco that Bolivia came to ask itself what its life meant.
Here, where the wilderness itself writhes in dry pain, is the starting
point for all of modern Bolivia. Boquerón, Nanawa, Kilometre 7,
Picuiba, Cañada Strongest are no longer inert toponyms; they
now contain their own dead. These are names that are alive for all
Bolivians. It is as if only there history (at least for Bolivia) shed its
routine existence and it is undoubtedly then, only then, that Bolivia
realized that power is destiny, that is, something sacred, something
for which ultimately one must kill or die.
The war, of course, was avoidable. Notwithstanding the motley
array of claims laid by the two parties, whatever the gravity of the
incidents that preceded the war itself, it is evident that it was possible
to agree upon a solution. It is bad state policy to think that the only
solution to everything is the imposition of ones own position
and this was of course the approach taken by the negotiators, the
‘Chacologists’. Why, indeed, did the two poorest, most backward and
emptiest countries of the region feel compelled to throw themselves
into a venture that proved so uncertain and so lethal? It was as if they
acted out of a sense of duty to themselves, perhaps because they felt
that all they had left was their honour. A negotiated solution was
what reason demanded and what followed from the outcome of the
war; but those who had to conduct the negotiations were not rea­
sonable men. Arbitrage would have been possible but only between
countries not subjected to such accumulated emotional pressure that
had never been rationally examined. This, which seems to be almost
a will to submit to a trial by fire, something nihilistic, mysterious and
primitive, is perhaps where we must attempt an explanation not
based on a reasoning coetaneous with the events, but on the charge
that conditioned that reasoning, that is, in the historical foundation
of these countries. All rational arguments demanded that they unite,
and yet they mustered, from the recesses of their impotence, argu­
ments to attack one another. Charcas, of course, was Charcas, like
258 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

the pearl of inland America. Asunción, meanwhile, had its own pres­
tige. Was it not, after all, the epicentre of colonial expansion in the
whole of Río de la Plata and then a modest country but also progres­
sive and harmonious, comparable in this to the Chile of the time, but
perhaps in a healthier way? There was undoubtedly a kind of weak
arrogance on the part of Charcas and there was no reason why
Asunción should not have harboured a certain vindicationism that
was not related to the Gran Chaco. There is a misunderstanding here.
People tend to see countries from the perspective of the present and
they are not necessarily wrong to do so because things are known in
their conclusion; each country, on the other hand, sees itself with the
eyes of its memory. That a country’s memory stagnates at a moment
in its past or that it becomes mythicized is not really important
because here what matters is what a country believes itself to be. The
component of collective memory in the ideological register is no
doubt greater than is commonly assumed. The Paraguayans, then,
carried their own historical burden.
This is also the case with Charcas. It is generally taken for
granted that the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata is the relevant frame
of reference for Bolivia in terms of its juridical origins. It is often
assumed that the centre of the viceroyalty was always Buenos Aires.
But the truth is that it was not Charcas that existed in its relation to
the viceroyalty but the viceroyalty that was constituted with its foun­
dation in Charcas. In principle, the territory of the viceroyalty was
Charcas. The viceroyalty of Peru was made up of the two audiencias
and that of Charcas comprised what is today Argentina, Bolivia,
Paraguay and Uruguay. Even when another audiencia was created,
that of Buenos Aires, now within the viceroyalty, half of the provinces
and most of the population remained in Charcas. The entire region,
moreover, lived off of Potosí and was constituted by its relation to it.
In both cases, we are dealing with countries whose relative
importance in the region had done none nothing but decline con­
tinuously. This, as we shall see, radicalizes the mood of intensity, of
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 259

national uncertainty. Both countries were hurt by the new economic

order of South America, by the substitution of a state-monopoly
economy based in the interior centres and fuelled by a lust for pre­
cious metals by an economy centred on the commercial periphery
of the ports, largely induced by the expansive phase of the English
textile industry.
Paraguay, as far as we know (although with a knowledge coloured
by the exultation of our sources) was certainly one of the most inter­
esting centres of those that revolved around Potosí. Following the
separation of the United Provinces (or of the Confederation, as Dr
Francia would have preferred to say), it was certainly a more popu­
lated province than the others, considered individually. It was a coun­
try constructed by the despotic-theological discourse of the Jesuits
(and this perhaps explains its politics which consists almost exclu­
sively of long cycles). The seigneurial landholding sector was there­
fore insignificant and control of the land quickly passed to the state,
although under negotiated terms that produced a virtual small­
holding peasantry. The dictators—Francia and the López fam ily-
ratified the Jesuit laws and developed them in their own way and
thus fashioned a despotic, paternalistic and dogmatic republic—but
also a more egalitarian one, in its most basic principles: legitimate
power, men who are free in practice. Our records of the country
before the war of the Triple Alliance show evidence of a certain sober
wellbeing in the life of the people, of a higher literacy rate than any­
where else on the continent in any case and, in short, of a kind of
poor but utopian polis. Paraguay was among the first Latin American
countries to build a railway—although its effective utility is unclear—
and also, more importantly, its own shipyards and a military industry.
All this, naturally, with the proportions of a small and isolated coun­
try. It was, at the same time, a country that had been shut off not only
to foreigners in general but also specifically to British trade, which
was seen, as it is now, as civilization itself. The vicissitudes of
the opening of trade, and, above all, the political reaction to the
260 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Paraguayan schism, allowed the new capitals of British commerce in

the region—Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo—to orga­
nize the war of the Triple Alliance, to plunder the country and to
produce a kind of demographic catastrophe from which Paraguay
never recovered.
The history of Bolivia in the nineteenth century is different but
its point of arrival is similar. The country itself, in its nineteenth-
century form, is the result of two events: the mercury crisis, which
was a consequence of Napoleons embargo against British trade and
the ruin of the Huancavelica mines, and the brutal agrarian war, the
Fifteen Years’ War or the war of the little republics [republiquetas] or
factions (the irregular endemic war that involved the whole country)
between 1809 and 1824. Only in New Granada was there such a
levelling of the forces of production as a consequence of war. With
the mercury crisis, the Potosí economy, which was already in steep
decline, finally collapsed. Potosí, meanwhile, was the key to unifica­
tion with the upper provinces and the concrete link was therefore
lost. Upper Peru was now nothing but violence in the m anner of
Facundo, so that the leaders of Buenos Aires, starting with Rivadavia
(bearing in mind that all of Argentina in the nineteenth century
and perhaps longer is nothing but the development of Rivadavias
Europeanist and racist ideas), saw the retention of the Upper
Provinces as utterly undesirable, while these provinces indeed
wanted this, as part of the confederation. With a greater population
than all the other territories together, they could only reinforce the
provinces of the north that, on the other hand, would not be reduced
to the emerging power of Buenos Aires until the second half of the
century.
Bolivar, as is evident in his correspondence with Sucre, could
not understand that the same capital—Buenos Aires—that had dis­
played an extraordinary lack of interest in these provinces, despite
the fact that these were the territories that kept the border region
independent from the rest of the viceroyalty, at once showed an
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 261

almost passionate interest in their separation. In short, Alvear, a man

from Buenos Aires, negotiated a deal with Bolivar in which what was
called Upper Peru (or Charcas, more precisely) at the end of the colo­
nial period would not be part of the United Provinces whose consti­
tution they had nonetheless endorsed. The will of the country that
had received Sucre with the blue and white flag of Belgrano opposed
this; but Bolivar, dictator of Peru, that is, of a place that had never
lost its Hispanophilic flavour, felt then perhaps for the first time his
Gran Colombianism and decreed that the formation of an enormous
country bordering Gran Colombia to the south that would be the
product of the almost natural union of Upper and Lower Peru was
undesirable. It was, therefore, something that nobody wanted and if
Buenos Aires, which after all had been a powerful revolutionary cen­
tre, was mistrustful of the defiant spirit of the Upper Peruvian
provinces, Lima had been—financially, militarily and spiritually—
the place from which these were pursued in their solitary struggle.
Lima, moreover, was a land whose independence had been won
against its will and Upper Peru, or Charcas, with the bankrupt oli­
garchy of the mercury miners and with a hundred little republics
founded upon the violence of an invincible geography, constituted
by a kind of direct democracy of war and, with an autonomous orga­
nizational capacity, a territorial-political aggregate with no hege­
monic nucleus, was incapable of resolving by itself and for itself the
grave question of its political power. The Upper Peruvians them ­
selves, who with a clear conscience had raised the flag of Belgrano
upon the arrival of Bolivars army, had to accept, and not without a
certain perplexity, their status as an independent country.
Even so, the events themselves could have warned them (if they
had been prudent men, but the ruling class only has prudent men at
its height, that is, in the early stages of its rule) that som ething
was changing in what they thought of as the nature of things. With
this we perhaps mean to justify, but by argumentum a contrario, the
certain arrogance or unjustified sureness of itself with which this
262 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

republic, destined to suffer all the perils of the world, was born. It
was, however, a sureness that did not come from itself and we can
discern in it a paranoia that would later be repeated, if its true that
paranoia consists in a split between intellect and sensibility. The fac­
tions or little republics themselves demonstrated not only an inex­
plicable and sometimes atrocious capacity for resistance (given that
they were never vanquished by anyone) but also the centrifugal
nature of power for which they laid the foundations (which explains
their inelegant designation as republiquetas). Much later, this would
take the form of a permeation of the national by the indigenous. In
other words, since leaders were nominated by the combatants and
the logistics were determined by the Indians, given that the very exis­
tence of a faction means, in concrete terms (although not in a legal
sense), that the landowners do not hold possession of their properties
so long as the military democracy lasts, it is a mass war with all the
features of the classic peasant wars: strong resistance and little chance
of victory. For those fond of transhistorical comparisons, for Toyn­
bee, for example, Amarus war or even the war of independence and
Miinzer’s would bear an uncanny resemblance. This is passed down
to the republic and would become a feature of the national character.
It would be a country of great military capacity in its masses, always
unyielding in their home territory, reproducing certain Incan limi­
tations because it would be a state with little ability to wage wars out­
side its own habitat, as if as a result of an excessive adaptation to its
environment. The faction, with the habits of democracy in arms,
would leave as its legacy a country of what Alcides Arguedas would
call, with all the bitterness of his soul, the ‘barbarous caudillos’ and
the ‘plebs in action. This explains the great distance between two
countries that are otherwise as similar as Peru and Bolivia. It is here,
in part, where the distinctive features of its social character are
forged.
The catastrophic silver bust would put an end to the mercury
mining oligarchy and this meant that it was a country born isolated
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 263

from the world, just as others—for example, Argentina—are born

through their interaction with the world. Isolated, moreover, from a
world that it itself had produced. It would therefore be a kind of con­
tingent state that would have to live till the last third of the nineteenth
century on indigenous tribute, a racial tax on the Indians as such,
which means that it would be a state in perpetual war with its own
population.
The learned men of Charcas,86 who were the recipients of inde­
pendence, gave no thought to any of this. They thought of the sump­
tuous glories of the Potosí of Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, of its splendour;
they felt like the indisputable centre of things and could not be con­
vinced that they had been left behind even when the Argentinians
told them as much as emphatically as possible through Alvear,
Anchorena or any number of others who had spoken on the issue.
The vanity with which Charcas thought of independence, its affec­
tation and self-satisfaction, can only be explained as the style of a
class that had never worked, that had grown accustomed to being
the unquestioned axis of things. Potosis silver and the servitude of
the Indians poisoned the country, and what might be understood as
its human counterpart everywhere lacked the ability to concretize
into a power structure.87
*

War teaches us a great deal about things. The two least powerful
countries of South America waged the greatest military conflict the
region has ever seen. The Chaco War has been called ‘the vicious
war’88 and perhaps for this reason it is so instructive to consider the
technical military analysis of its events together with the sociological

86 Los doctores de Charcas, a term for the intellectual and political elite at
independence, often mocking its distance from the populace.
87 End of passage from Consideraciones generales sobre la historia de Bolivia.
88 Charles Arnade, La dramática insurgencia de Bolivia (La Paz: Juventud,
1964), p. 11.
264 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

premises that surrounded them. We will try to do this primarily from

the perspective of the existing Bolivian state, because this is the gen­
eral object of our analysis. Meanwhile, we think that David Zooks
study89 is the most objective and also the most useful for this manner
of stocktaking, although it is clear that in availing ourselves of this
work we must ignore its eminently contemporary orientation, that
is, the poverty of its historical horizon.
In the first place, with regard to the very conception of the war:
the Paraguayans were convinced ‘that Bolivia was contemplating a
full-scale conflict’, and consequently ‘[o]n 30 June [1932] [General
Estigarribia] called for commitment in the Isla Poi sector within
twenty days of “all the available population of the country” to van­
quish the enemy and save the Paraguayan Republic.’90
It must be said that such a mobilization never occurred in
Bolivia, perhaps because in essence this formation, because of its het­
erogeneity [abigarramiento], was incapable of conceiving the idea of
a ‘general mobilization’. Perhaps the closest precedents were the non-
indigenous mobilization in the siege of La Paz by Katari and that of
Cochabamba against Goyeneche’s advance. In any case, it is clear
that, for one reason or another, the attribute ‘national’ was automat­
ically ascribed to the war in Paraguay and not at all in Bolivia. Here
a more or less complex problem arises, which is the construction of
the image of the war that must be waged, that is, the ideologeme
under which men will fight. To launch a national war without a
certain radical concept of it, that is, without considering the possi­
bility of generalizing it, is in itself a great risk; in insurrections, as in
wars, one must always be willing to carry them through to the end
or not wage them at all. On the other hand, it is difficult to engage
the degree of mobilization necessary for a war in the twentieth cen­
tury without giving it the necessary elements of a national war

89 Zook, The Conduct of the Chaco War.

90 Ibid., p. 84.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 265

because, indeed, it is here, in the national war, that war ‘recovers its
true nature!
What remains to be determined then is whether Salamanca, as
the ‘symbolic man, expressed only himself or if he was the cathartic
fulfilment of a compulsion, that is, if he expressed the necessity of a
real form of something that had already appeared (the oligarchic
state) or if the entire country simply followed him in a fit of temper.
In any case, in contrast to the Paraguayans of Isla Poi, Paraguay was
for Salamanca ‘the little devil’91 and the war not only presented no
danger but it also became an opportunity that had bestowed great
fortune [upon Bolivia]’.92 An opportunity that, moreover, could not
be squandered in the service of pettifogging schemes: ‘Possesssion
of the Gran Chaco cannot be the subject of protocols, of arbitrage or
negotiations.’93
In short, the figure that constituted the symbolic condensation
of the oligarchic political civilization and of course acted as moral
leader of the war from the outset proposed that peace be made in
Asunción because he was obsessed with what we might aptly call the
cartographic objectives of the conflict. At this point, Salamancas
charismatic style was obviously largely founded on the non-negotiable
attitude of a Belcista programme that stirred up internal public opin­
ion. This, however, consisted in dangerous boasts in which not even
they themselves believed except when they were turned against them.
Neither society as such nor its heteronational apex seriously believed
that the Gran Chaco was a vital part of the country, and if it was, as
the ‘symbol’ claimed, an existential matter, this was true for Paraguay
but not for Bolivia. Some have attributed this hyperbolization to a
Petrópolis complex. Salamanca, however, identified the country with
the oligarchic political system (to which he had only to supplement

91 Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay, p. 162.

92 Céspedes, Salamanca o El metafisico delfracaso, p. 28.
93 David Alvéstegui, Salamanca: Su gravitación sobre el destino de Bolivia,
v o l . 3 (La Paz: Talleres Gráficos, 1957), p. 185.
266 • RENfc ZAVALETA MERCADO

with Salamanquismo what was subtracted of Montismo) to such an

extent that he thought that with the catharsis of the Gran Chaco the
nations faith in itself, lost in the War of the Pacific, could be restored.
He thought, in short, that Bolivia was guaranteed an easy and cheap
military victory, an assumption based in an alienation proper to the
Panglossian vision of the oligarchic state.
Bolivia’s underestimation of her opponent was astonishing.
[ . . . ] In December 1931 a twenty-six-page Operations Plan
#1, prepared by G-3, argued that since war of maneuver
would be impossible in the Chaco, five reinforced battalions
of 812 men each, with integral batteries of mountain guns,
would be adequate for a war with Paraguay.94
Already in 1924, Kundt, the eternal optimist, had maintained
that since the Paraguayans are poor soldiers, Asuncion could be
taken with 3,000 men.95 Not only this, but ‘he believed that twenty
thousand men would be sufficient to achieve their objectives in the
Pacific’.96
All this, of course, only illustrates certain general sentiments of
that period overrun by more of the same. Patino would certainly have
done a better job of managing the war.
‘The Austrians,’ it has been said, ‘proceeded with such indolence,
calculation, reticence, that they completely forgot their objective.’
Kundt, in short, was a theorist of the ‘cheap war’ that fit so well with
Salamanca’s soma because the former believed in what the latter
wanted: a sweeping victory at a low cost. True superiority, political
or military, is not an abstract or general fact but the sum of the factors
at play. In this case, it is not only, as is conventionally said, that
Bolivia once again paid dearly for having unpopulated territory. We
could say that this is a crude assertion because then a country would
always have to wait until it had a literal demographic presence before

94 Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War, p. 90.

95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., p. 126.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 267

it could defend a territory while in reality there are many other forms
of belonging to a space, but here there was none at all. Bolivia lacked
any kind of territorial sovereignty in the Gran Chaco and there was
not even a ritual relation of legitimacy of the state with the Toba
people; this distinguishes it thoroughly from Atacama. In any case,
Bolivia wasted its unprecedented relative demographic superiority
(unprecedented because this was the only possible case) and surren­
dered to Paraguay’s geographic superiority:
Had Bolivia conducted general mobilization during August
and struck promptly, she would likely have attained the river
and won the war. Instead she remained passive, mobilizing
in dribbles; this enabled Paraguay to bring to bear her deci­
sive advantage in space, and to achieve earlier concentration
of numerically superior forces.97
We cannot say that Paraguay then had an advanced social
equation as we can, even if only in comparative terms, of Chile in
1879. Between a civil society levelled by the Triple Alliance and an
exogenous state, which succeeded only in being pro-Argentine or
pro-Brazilian, one could not have expected much. Despite these dif­
ficulties, the relation between the state and society was more
favourable than in Bolivia and this in itself tells us that the idea of
the state optimum does not necessarily refer to fully developed posi­
tions. It was the right state for the corresponding social situation
under the circumstance of an intense mobilizing force. Meanwhile,
in Bolivia, the period was marked by the decline of a state constituted
against its society, out of options and rallied around a kind of jingoist,
arrogant patriotism.
All the Bolivian authors subscribe to Querejazus claim that
Bolivia threw itself into the war ‘when there was a total of 1,251 men
spread out over that vast territory’98 (some 200,000 square kilome­
tres), which would prove only that it was a nation of fools. If this was

97 Ibid., p. 91.
98 Querejazu Calvo, Masamaclay, p. 63.
268 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

the case, it was necessary to make peace at any price, even if only to
gain time to recruit. On the other hand, there would have had to be
a revolution if they had come to such an extreme situation with
such weak preparation, which is to say in which the state didn’t see
it coming at all.
Zooks account is more realistic: ‘At the beginning of October of
1932, each country had total forces of around 20,000, the vital dif­
ference being in their deployment. In the main theatre, Bolivia had
about 5,500 with 2,000 more en route, while Paraguay fielded
12, 000.’"
The operative idea here is that of deployment. The sterile relation
between the population and the territory is not so important. The
circulation of men in the territory lends the population itself a greater
productivity of state or national substance. A territory, ultimately,
belongs to us insofar as we can deploy ourselves towards it more
swiftly and with a greater sense of identity than anyone else. In other
words, where we can say: ‘We exist there.’ On the other hand, to go
to an unincorporated space is perhaps the most difficult military task
for any state.
This is a result of the process of decomposition of war, which the
Bolivian armed forces should have learned better from Bolivian his­
tory than the Paraguayans from theirs. Not only the war of commu­
nications but also an ecological war had begun, and it became clear
that the poverty of the post-Potosi system of circulation produced
men who belonged to their own immediate terrain and not to their
historical landscape. Hence the invariable consequence of the con­
stant numerical superiority of the Paraguayans over the course of the
entire campaign. In fact, it must be acknowledged that a greater
human presence in a given place is proof of possession. Indeed:
The Andean Indian [ . . . ] was transported from the Alti-
plano to the Chaco like a beast, unaware of his purpose, and 9

99 Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War, p. 102.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 269

then thrust untrained into combat. He was seldom

employed in sufficient numbers at a given tactical moment.
Although in the course of the war Bolivia mobilized nearly
250,000 as against 140,000 Paraguayans, her forces rarely
possessed numerical superiority.100
This is one of Zooks few expressions of sympathy for the Boli­
vian soldier, and it is therefore quite objective. The Indian was not
only transported like a beast, but was treated like a beast in all aspects
of life. It was a society founded on treating Indians like beasts. ‘Com­
bat training’ is really a relation to the state and no such thing had
existed in a normal way except with Belzu, that is, if by training we
understand a relation of reciprocity with the state, this had been
nearly impossible for a long time. What is inexplicable here, on the
contrary, is the profound, unconditional loyalty towards an antago­
nistic state objective, which expressed the deep horizon of identity:
the struggle for a future identity. Finally, the senseless decimation of
these men reveals a secret desire to exterminate them, which was in
the logic of social Darwinism.
It bears repeating that a country’s inability to mobilize its own
potential when it must is already eloquent. This, contrary to what
might be assumed, does not attest to Bolivia’s inferiority, unless we
believe, as in what Gramsci called the fetishism of unification, that
the entire country is better off when it is more standardized. It is
obvious that the secret of countries like Bolivia or Italy resides in the
multiplicity of their micro-universes, unless, of course, these paralyse
the formation of a modern unity. Let us leave aside the fact that
Paraguay was like an overgrown and homogeneous province, and
that therefore its internal relation to its population was more efficient
than that of Bolivia. The Gran Chaco, moreover, was certainly
better linked to its central territorial character than to Bolivias. On
the other hand, the simple administrative explanation of under­
mobilization is insufficient, although it merits discussion in its own

100 Ibid., p. 149.

270 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

right, because it would have been reasonable to expect of the oli­

garchic elite at least the bureaucratic control of its own society. The
fact is that the Bolivian state did not correspond to its own theoretical
demographic proportions and, in any case, it acted with the concrete
capacity that it possessed in its internal integration: it could not reach
its own men or rally them to its objectives when the time came.
Two logics, then, were brought into opposition. One, that of
Estigarribia, who knew that Paraguay could not defeat Bolivia, but also
that it could realistically defend itself against Bolivia. The other, that
of Salamanca, who clung to the fantasy of an easy symbolic victory, a
cartographic victory that would entail nothing less than the conquest
of Paraguay, that is, a possible objective and an impossible one, because
as with Bolivia in the Pacific, and the Chileans knew this, it was con­
ceivable to conquer Paraguay but not incorporate it. To set impossible
objectives in military matters is, of course, to invite disaster.
Estigarribia, a modest but more powerful man, was aware of
three fundamental facts:
1. Paraguay’s essential superiority with regard to the terrain:
‘Logistically Paraguay, with her shorter lines of supply and
communication, was superior to Bolivia, an advantage
which largely negated the greater size and wealth of the
Altiplano-centred republic [ . . . ] . Here river vessels com­
plemented this facility [that of the railway] at Puerto
Casado, thus forming a cohesive transportation system of
relative quality.’101
Indeed, from the end of the railway line to the theatre
of operations there was a distance of only 200 kilometres
and Paraguay was able to deploy 16,000 men in 36 days.
2. What is summed up in Estigarribia’s assertion: ‘We are
entering a war of communications’, a lucid response to the
problem of expanse. Communication is more important

101 Ibid., p. 92.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 271

where it is more difficult. With the robust and simple lin­

earity of his thought he arrived at ‘the revolution in logis­
tics occasioned by the motor truck’102This is brilliant. Not
an admiration of technology in general but of the truck,
which was the means by which technology could come to
the Gran Chaco. At the same time, Salamanca, within the
logic of the economical war (which is to say, a cheap or
free war, a precapitalist concept), refuses to buy 600 trucks
in April 1932 while in July ‘[h]e compounded his error by
launching ( . . . ) reprisals without resolving the funda­
mental problem of transport’,103 in a typical seigneurial
fashion: they must be punished; how the punishment is
to be carried out is not the lord’s the concern.
3. Estigarribia’s (and also Zook’s) reflection on the problem
of water. It was an essential resource of the area and also
the scarcest. The water supply determined the forms of
combat. ‘The lessons of the day [Boquerón] were explicit
and foretold the character of the entire war. Water was a
vital factor. ( . . . ) It was obvious that a lack of water could
of itself destroy an army in the Chaco. As in the World
War, defence, when field fortifications the fire power of
numerous automatic weapons, was vastly superior to
frontal assault.’104
Water, Bolivia’s old obsession. It suppressed, more­
over, another profoundly national faculty, which was the
inclination towards frontal attack. (On this subject, Kundt
simply offers a reading of the national temperament.) It
is enough to resist the savage fury of the Bolivians for the
key to their undoing to appear. Here we have come to the
heart of the matter.

102 Ibid., p. 84.

103 Ibid., p. 92.
104 Ibid., p. 94.
272 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

Clausewitz says: ‘Nothing is more important in life than finding

the right standpoint for seeing and judging events, and then adhering
to it. One point, and one only, yields an integrated view of all phe­
nomena; and only by holding to that point of view can one avoid
inconsistency.’105 This means that no matter how many ideas one
might have, one must, in one’s conduct at least, follow a certain, cen­
tral, master idea, that is, one must manoeuvre according to what is
most thoroughly verified. Estigarribia clearly incorporated into his
reasoning these early lessons of the war—the strategic rather than
tactical importance of water, the new role of defensive warfare—in a
kind of conceptual construction proper to the war. It has indeed been
said that insurrection is an art; but combat is an art in a very partic­
ular sense: it is a situation that only allows for a synthetic or artistic
characterization of things; it does not readily lend itself to a scholastic
and calculable knowledge; therefore, the necessity arises of adhering
to what little knowledge is essentially verifiable, such as the impor­
tance of water and the defense of Boquerón. Salamanca could not
grasp either of these among other things because he had not been
there and the government, in short, lacked structures of mediation
linking it to the rest of society, that which fought and that which
waited. Therefore, since he could not know, he believed in effect in
an inspired knowledge. Zook says this well: Estigarriba
‘demonstrated from the beginning of the war that he
possessed the primordial qualities of a genuine caudillo of
military command: Tener una idea! That idea was to seek
annihilation of the Bolivian army as far as possible from
nuclear Paraguay.106
This was the antithesis of the Bolivian command. Since
Salamanca was the intellectual leader, it could not be expected of

105 Clausewitz, On War, p. 532.

106 Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War, p. 127. The quoted text in the pas­
sage is from José Carlos Fernández, La Guerra del Chaco, VOL. 2 (Buenos Aires:
n.p., 1962), p. 325.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 273

such an abstract thinking (or, rather, one so poisoned by poor but

successful abstractions) that it address certain decisive minutiae such
as water or even logistics. The senile optimism of the oligarchy trag­
ically coincided, moreover, with the character of the modern Bolivian
masses, which tended incessantly towards the logic of frontal attack.
From this perspective, that of the masses, the inclination towards the
offensive no doubt has to do with a pathetic unification; it is the per­
formance of unity through passion of men who are not united in their
daily lives. On the other hand, if Kundt confused stubbornness with
efficiency (as a certain prototype of German men tends to do), we
cannot attribute to him what constituted a whole idea of war, surely
an idea that was readily apparent: that which is based on the under­
estimation of the enemy and disregard for loss of life, ultimately
because it was a loss Indian lives, that is, an entirely palatable loss.
This—the conscious desire to trade Indian lives for a particular fetish
that was the a grandeur conceived in territorial term s—is evident
throughout the war.
The desertion of men of the upper ranks, moreover, remarkably
coincided with the invitation extended to Kundt and other foreigners
to direct the war. As one well versed in the subject has aptly said:
‘Experience has shown that only princes and armed republics achieve
solid success and that mercenaries bring nothing but loss.107
The truth is that Bolivia was a society in a state of error and this
was the root of the mistakes made by its political and military leaders.
If Estigarribia and Toro had suddenly appeared at the same time,
for example (not to mention Peñaranda, who was a stupid man), the
latter—Toro—would not have seemed so bad. He seems to have rep­
resented, as few men have, a culture of sophistry and a frivolousness
extolled by certain Chuquisacan conventions, since language games
are a tradition there. Meanwhile, Salamanca would certainly have
compared favourably to Alaya. At another level and on both sides,

107 Niccolo MachiaveUi, The Prince (George Bull trans.) (H arm ondsw orth:
Penguin, 1975), p. 49.
274 # REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

the officials and soldiers displayed tremendous bravery and it is there

whence names like Busch, Bilbao or Ustarez emerged, all of plebeian
origin. In spite of this, at least assuming that they were of similar
stock or were equivalent men, as they surely were, here we come to
what is inexplicable: some acted in an absurd manner, which seemed
demented and self-destructive, while others adhered to the rule of
sound logic, which turned out to be more than enough. We need, of
course, a material explanation of all this because it has to do with the
social foundation of Bolivia. For some reason, there was something
that tended to go wrong invariably or almost invariably, however
great the sacrifices made.
Let us turn now to the consequences of this in the construction
of politics. When all opinions are always final and irreconcilable, it
means that the political has not been constituted, that it has not been
autonomized. There is a point to which a syncretic attitude is what
defines civilized man. We know, on the other hand, that debate in
times of great peril is a serious matter. Disobedience in war is equiv­
alent to a failure of the only possible pilots to agree in the operation
of a plane. Defiance and dissent have a long history in Bolivia; in
reality, they come from a long tradition of treason, anarchy and
insurrection because all experience produces habits.
The relationship between Estigarribia and Alaya, meanwhile,
was one of two men in a state of normality. The latter wrote in an
eloquent letter to the former:
This nervous population, which is already sensitive to panic
[ . . . ] The people pass from enthusiasm and depression
according to the information from the front [ . . . ] In any
case, [he stressed] you can be assured that my personal and
official authority will be on your side in good and, above all,
in bad conditions.108

108 Cited in Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War, p. 137.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 275 I

Relying on this support, at one point Estigarribia dismissed a

high-ranking officer on the spot on his own account and was duly
backed up.
Things were different within the Bolivian leadership. In princi­
ple, it is not that the military leaders were injudicious.
The army would require definite objectives, not mere
historical aspirations [ . . . ] . The historical hypothesis of
Salamanca, which aimed at total reintegration, would
require a nation in arms to sustain military occupation of
the entire Chaco and dictate peace at Asunción. [ . . . ] The
military objective of the command, however, remained
Olimpo and the river above.10910
Zook continues: ‘Obviously, such a settlement would have given
Daniel Salamanca apoplexy, although it was more realistic than his
own proposals. In reality, however, Bolivia laced the transport to
implement either plan.,no
At least there was an awareness of the difficulty of radicalizing
the ambition of a ‘nation in arms’ and a certain resistance to the
Salamancan assumption that titles proffer victories. This moral dis­
content or technical reserve had to undergo an anomic development.
Indeed, evident in the observation that ‘Peñarandas inability to com­
mand Colonel Toro . . . was tragic for Bolivia’, there was something
more than breaches of discipline that, moreover, should have been
foreseen and prevented. Toro became ‘the sinister power behind the
command’ but this itself was a consequence of ‘the weakness of
Peñaranda and his utter misunderstanding of his own proper role
[which was] so patent as to require no comment*, ultimately a con­
sequence of his ‘impotent pusillanimity’.111

109 Ibid., pp. 88-9.

110 Ibid., p. 89.
111 Ibid., pp. 198-9.
276 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

If the nature of modern power lies in rationality and trans­

personalism and verifiability, we have here just the opposite. There
is unquestionably a personalized conception of the exercise of power,
as if it were an inherent or inalienable attribute of the its subject. The
paucity of real legitimacy of power, on the other hand, in a country
that was moreover accustomed to not recognizing anyone in power,
was ultimately based only on the exaggerated authority of Salamanca
or his symbolic construction, which, precisely because it was exag­
gerated, necessarily produced persistent forms of insubordination,
furtive dissent and, finally, outright rebellion.
The command, he wrote, acted as i f ‘military assignments
are intangible personal rights, even when necessities of dis­
cipline and of defence demand convenient changes’. The
exchange of recriminations, misunderstandings, lack of dis­
cipline and hatred between President and General, Diaz
observes, led Bolivia down the road to defeat, culminating
first in the overthrow of Salamanca and finally in loss of the
Chaco.112
The attribution of authority not to a rationally and normatively
revocable appointment but to ‘intangible personal right’ belongs to
the purest seigneurial reason. The impassioned excess of power,
moreover, was a pure fantasy and, in any case, it would have to be
successful to become valid. Rodriguez and Toro, Salamanca and
Kundt represented two mutually impossible styles, which were
nonetheless durable in a perverse way. In descriptive terms, insub­
ordination was a paradoxical result of what came from above, from
Salamanca’s deification, which need not have occurred in an almost
elegiac fashion in him (because he was like a dead man attending his
own glorious funeral), since it had occurred before in the limited
society that had elected him (that which was left after the exclusion
of the popular sectors). Salamanca, in short, had an attitude of intel-

112 Ibid., p. 210.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 277

lectual arrogance that was characteristic of that social sector and of

that time. He was no doubt an intelligent man and lucid in his con­
ceptual articulation. This does not mean that he was intelligent in
his grasp of reality. In any case, everything seems to indicate that his
knowledge of the world was very limited because he was not pre­
pared to believe that the world could be something other than what
he thought it was. Upon becoming the formal, affective, embodied
culmination of a system that had been looking for just that, for a
symbolic man, he indeed behaved like a symbolic man, like someone
bearing prescient truths. His contempt for a public opinion as
equable as that of the oligarchy (a bunch of quasi-intellectuals and
their cronies) nonetheless did not stop him from almost perfectly
expressing the prejudices of his age. He was anticommunist, as had
been his countryman Baptista, even before there were any commu­
nists. His stubborn optimism with regard to Paraguay was that of
Montes, who surely assumed that with the Chilean indemnification
he could buy the whole world, which (from his point of view) was
not very big. We will have to return to this problem of the visibility
(or invisibility) of the world.
With this curriculum vitae it is understandable that Salamanca
not only presumed to understand the problem, like anyone else, but
also to personally orchestrate its solution: ‘Salamanca, since the
beginning of the penetration plan, had exercised an increasingly per­
sonal influence on military decisions. ( . . . ) Although abjectly igno­
rant of tactical considerations, he sought to direct operations.
The incident of Pitiantuta is exemplary here: M ajor Moscoso
saw a great lagoon from the air. The general staff with the knowledge
of His Excellency the President of the Republic, then ordered the
Fourth Division to ‘occupy the Great Lagoon immediately, because
‘the latest accords in neutral Washington negotiations would pres­
sure litigating countries urgently to precisely identify th eir most

113 Ibid., p. 103.

278 • RENÉ ZAVALETA MERCADO

advanced positions’.114 In June 1932, Moscoso carried out the order

and the Paraguayans fled. Salamanca then felt betrayed:
‘The news came like a lightning bolt out of nowhere’, for he
had ordered the occupation to be implemented abstaining
from all contact with the enemy’, proceeding ‘with the
utmost circumspection’ and ‘if a Paraguayan approach is
detected [ . . . ] the unit will proceed cautiously to establish
Bolivian forts or posts at a distance of 20 or 30 kilometres
from the Paraguayan posts.’115
As Céspedes says, ‘20 or 30 kilometres without water in the
Chaco wilderness is an unthinkable distance’,116 which means that to
‘abstain from contact’ would have been absurd. Still, Salamanca
ordered ‘the immediate abandonment of the Paraguayan fort’.117
Moscoso later commented:
For a unit that for 20 days had suffered water shortages and
covered an extensive area tellingly called Campo de Deso­
lación [Desolation Fields, thus christened by Ustárez], the
presence of an inexhaustible water source stimulated their
patriotism and the desire to conquer it. Any official
instructed to avoid clashes with the enemy, after the distance
I had crossed with my soldiers [ . . . ] would have attacked
the fort.118
The dismissal of Osorio, one of the leaders of the first phase of
the war, is a similar story. Salamanca answered the objections to this
saying that ‘Osorio had been removed with popular approval’.119
It was a stupid thing to say in any case because this is not an
argument. If war were waged through popular consensus on every

114 Céspedes, Salamanca o El metafisico del fracaso, p. 64.

115 Ibid., p. 65.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 66.
119 Zook, The Conduct o f the Chaco War, p. 104.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES # 279

decision there would be no battles but only plebiscites. The affair, as

was inevitable, ended while the fighting went on, with Salamanca
saying that ‘the command had lost the “sympathy o f the people” *
while, just as inevitably, the command (Peñaranda) said that ‘the gov­
ernment had “lost the confidence of the Army” *,120which was, in any
case, more serious.
This is more important than it seems. The measure of hegemony,
that is, of the optimum, consists in the extent to which contradic­
tions can be absorbed in it, that is, in something beyond its subjects
or within a subject capable of containing all subjects. That in its
ideologico-political formalization the liberal state had to resort to a
pontifical mode of power, in a strange combination of personaliza­
tion and lack of effective personal power, the very fact that it had to
appeal, to survive, to its most stringent internal critic, all this proved,
of course, the systems loss of coherence. But the situation continued
to deteriorate. It was a state that had to appeal to its last resort,
Salamanca, a cross between Linares and Baptista. This is not some­
thing that would have occurred in a state of normality. Moreover,
that in his impenitent antipathy towards the military Salamanca
turned to extreme acts of humiliation such as the appointment of a
German as national commander, or attempting to designate Joaquin
Espada as civil inspector of an army in the midst of a war, or, finally,
inviting Ismael Montes to serve as commander when he had become
no more than a vestige of his former self, all of this indicates a lack
of national coherence.
The rift between the military and Salamanca (the political class
incarnate) already reveals the division of the state. This would be
forcefully expressed later on and it is in fact one of the sources of the
revolutionary crisis of 1952. Indeed, where there is no division of the
ruling class, there is no revolutionary crisis. In essence, however, even
more fundamentally, this shows that the political suppression of the
majority of the population produced a situation of intellectual, psy-

120 Ibid., p. 198.

280 • REN£ ZAVALETA MERCADO

chological and behavioural anomaly that explains the fact that these
men, surely intelligent enough in principle, acted in an erratic and
divisive way. The horizon of visibility of the world was determined
by the social base; this is proof of the effectivity of the social base
upon cognitive activity. It is what explains the persistent degenerative
tendencies of the Bolivian state even after 1952 in its constant incli­
nation towards the oligarchization of power.
Zook then falls into the error of insufficient generality in believing
that ‘the close cooperation of President Alaya and Estigarribia lent
added strength to the country and was in no small measure respon­
sible for the outcome of the war’.121 This is almost like the attribution
of success to the protestant ethic. On the contrary, this cooperation
was possible because behind it was Paraguay such as it was. This was
essentially founded on the ideological conception of the war as an
absolute danger, a conception that was correct but that also served
an organizing function. On the other hand, it was made possible by
the survival of certain hereditary forms o f‘health’ that came, in their
positive aspect, from the non-aristocratizing and non-seigneurial
formation of that society (largely by the Jesuits) and also from the
internalized habit of compliance with authority, whatever this might
be, a not especially positive inheritance from the great dictators.
At Christmas 1934, a melancholy Salamanca, now deposed,
would say that ‘militarism, which had not been capable of repelling
the foreign enemy, has already imposed its domination in Bolivia.*122
Since a military approach to things was adopted, there was nothing
unusual in the fact that that things would become militaristic. But
the collapse of the oligarchic state continued implacably and not only
because of the inauguration of a period of military rule.
It translated, for example, into an absolute lack of faith in the
men of the country and of the system. Salamanca’s xenophobia was
applied contemptuously to the Paraguayans and timorously to the

121 Ibid., p. 199.

122 Cited in ibid., p. 214.
 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 2S1

Chileans, but within a context of confidence in the foreign that, as

we have seen, characterizes the entire oligarchic state and perhaps
an entire caste. When Kundt left, hated by all, Salamanca brought in
a Czech military mission and even his own interior police chief was
a Mexican cristero.
The deterioration of the Bolivian troops continued in the way
imagined by Kundt and applied by Salamanca and his men. In
Nanawa, for example, ‘[t]he Bolivians repeated their common errors
of inadequate coordination, lack of intelligence, violation of the prin­
ciple of economy of force and underestimation of the enemy*.123 The
result: ‘In 10 days’ fighting, the defenders suffered only 248 casualties
against 2,000 Bolivian losses. Nanawa could not be subdued and
insufficient were available to lay siege.’124 It was the greatest frontal
assault of the ‘aggressive Andeans’ (Zook): ‘at 0905, nearly 7,000
charged across no-mans-land. [ . . . ] The German [Kundt] sacrificed
the best of his army. Over 2,000 Altiplano soldiers died futilely in
front of the III Corps defences.*125 This is the story of more or less
the entire war. In Toledo:
By 5 March, the Bolivians had lost nearly 2,000. They were
short of food and water; some men even lacked clothes,
fighting in their shorts; the stench of 700 unburied dead in
no-mans-land was unbearable. [ . . . ] Insubordination was
rife and on the night of 16 March the 30th Infantry fled,
shooting at the officers.126

Insubordination, which Toro and Quintanilla had set in

motion among officers, spread rapidly to the fatigued
Andean troops, deteriorating their faith in thejefes. Defeated,

123 Ibid., p. 129.

124 Ibid., p. 130.
125 Ibid., p. 146.
126 Ibid., p. 132.
282 • RENE ZAVALETA MERCADO

poorly supplied and even lacking a mail service, the Bolivian

soldiers were easily demoralized.127
This closely resembles Russia leading up to the Treaty of Brest
Litovsk. The country, however, seemed indefatigable and what is
striking is the constant capacity for construction of the army: three
armies are organized over the course of the war. All this is very
strange because the normal thing would be for people to refuse to
fight, especially after adversities and disasters that revealed such a
patent ineffectiveness of the state and of the command. To accept
such losses was to truly accept the absurd. To go on fighting still
when all is /ost, to fight, as they said, ‘for the honour of the regiment*,
is perhaps what best expresses the heroism of the people at that
moment. The sense of reconstruction and of resistance of the
Bolivian troops ultimately frustrated the Paraguayan offensive, in
keeping with the most basic prognoses with regard to this absurd
war. A single battle like Campo Via, although notable for the military
success of Estigarribia, would cost Paraguay 15,000 casualties
between the dead and the wounded.
The consequences of the Chaco War were enormous for Bolivia.
We cannot say that there was a political class in the liberal-oligarchic
state, but there was a kind of elite based on charismatic-seigneurial
election that is more or less arbitrary [ocasional] or pertains only to
a limited social base. With Salamanca came the disbandment of this
sector. The praetorianization of power, power as the monopoly of
bad military men, is its result. The state finally resorts, inevitably, to
a state of emergency, that is, to the army. Thus begins the first mili­
tary period of Bolivian history in the twentieth century, a period that
would last until 1952. To this we must add the decline of the tin m in­
ing industry. It was, then, truly a state living on its reserves.
The situation, as the stubborn capacity for struggle in defeat
proves, is different with regard to civil society. The Chaco War was

127 Ibid., p. 106.

 THE TORPOR OF CENTURIES • 283

a true constitutive moment. Some 50,000 men died of 240,000 who

were deployed—at least one in five. The country lost 2 per cent of its
population. This death toll is less significant than Cuba’s at the end
of the nineteenth century or that of the Mexican Revolution, but we
must consider that the figure includes only young men. A kind of
identification is forged through the war, that form of historical com­
merce of which Clausewitz spoke. It is certainly a nationalizing event
that would have formidable consequences. The Paraguayan death
toll was also high (3.5 per cent of the population). Victory, however,
even a Pyrrhic victory, has its satisfactions, which here were badly
needed, and the result was a certain weak local form of ratification
of the model of domination. In Bolivia, on the other hand, the result
was a generalized hegemonic contestation of the state, unanimous at
least among veterans. We have come, then, to the deep causes of the
multitude of 1952 and the order of things that attended the consti­
tution of the next phase of the Bolivian state, which is the state of
1952.
 Afterword
ANNE FREELAND

A Note on the Translation

René Zavaleta Mercado’s prose is famously idiosyncratic, and it will

be helpful to discuss some of the problems of translation of terms
that refer to central concepts in his work.
Abigarramiento. The most salient of these terms is sociedad abigar­
rada, translated here as ‘motley’ or sometimes simply ‘heteroge­
neous’ society (also discussed in my Note on the Text). Zavaleta
uses heterogéneo to refer to the same quality but the specific con­
notations of the more distinctive abigarrado should be borne in
mind. The term does not refer to difference in the sense of plu­
ralism or multiculturalism but, at least in its initial formulation,
to the overlapping of multiple modes of production, and, there­
fore, of multiple historical moments, within a territory claimed
by a single nation-state. Unlike the more neutral heterogéneo,
abigarrado connotes disjointedness, incongruousness, beyond
mere difference.
Disponibilidad. This term refers to a society’s readiness (a cognate
would be ‘disposition’) to receive or respond to the interpellation
of a new hegemonic project, to fundamentally alter its conception
of the world and of itself. The standard English equivalent of
disponibilidad is ‘availability’, but I have translated it here as
‘receptivity’, which I think is a more precise rendering in this case.
My translation, however, is perhaps too passive, and there are
places where I even leant towards using ‘w ill’. It is a willingness
 AFTERWORD • 285

to enter into a new set of social relations and an openness to the

epistemic transformation that such a repositioning of the subject
entails.
Patetico. ‘Pathetic’ should always be read here as the adjectival form
of pathos and not in the colloquial sense. It does not, however,
refer to rhetoric but to the affective element of social identifica­
tion and collective subject formation.
Optimo/ecuacion social. Translated literally here as social optimum’
or ‘social equation, these terms are used interchangeably to refer
to the level of articulation or communication between society
and the state. A high ‘social optimum’ is characteristic of what
Gramsci called the integral state in which the institutions of civil
society are thoroughly integrated into the ethico-political pro­
gramme of political society, or the state in the narrow sense.
Irresistibilidad. Always an attribute of the state, this term generally
refers to the effective capacity to rule in a given territory. I have
used a number of different words in different contexts: usually
‘authority’, but sometimes enforceability’, ‘power’, coercion; on
one occasion ‘solidity’; and, in the context of a superstition of
the irresistibilidad of the state’, meaning an inability to envision
the transformation or replacement of the state in the broad
sense, ‘indestructibility*. While each of these conveys the sense
of the respective passages better than a single word applicable to
all could, the specific import of the concept developed through
the repetition of the term, and the unity of these different senses,
is lost.
Verificable. As a modifier of the form of power, this refers to the
principle of rational-legal authority. It is generally translated
as ‘verifiable’ but I have also used ‘rational where this helps to
clarify the sense. Zavaleta regularly draws explicitly upon Weber,
and also uses rational in this sense, and so I think the citation is
justified. I have also translated the noun constatabilidad, in one
instance, as ‘rationality’.
286 • ANNE FREELAND

A Note on the Text

Zavaleta came of age with Bolivia’s National Revolution of 1952, an
event that marked the emergence of organized labour as a major
political force in the country and a shift in the national discourse
comparable to that which took place in 2005 with the election of Evo
Morales as the continent’s first indigenous president. Zavaleta was
active in the political life of the MNR, serving briefly as minister of
mines and petroleum in addition to holding diplomatic posts in
Uruguay and Chile and contributing regularly to national and
regional newspapers. In these early years, prior to his official break
with the MNR in 1969, Zavaleta had positioned himself within a crit­
ical left wing of the diverse coalition that formed the base of a regime
that he would later acknowledge had effectively been co-opted by
local elites and US interests within its first four years and which
finally collapsed in 1964, followed by two decades of military rule.
During this period, Zavaleta moved towards a more rigorously
Marxist intellectual framework and he was a founding member of
the Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Left
Movement or MIR], which he left shortly after to join the Partido
Comunista de Bolivia [Communist Party of Bolivia or PCB]. In 1971,
he was arrested by the military regime and went into exile in Chile;
following the Pinochet coup of 1973, he fled to Mexico where he was
the first director of the Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias
Sociales (FLACSO) and where he lived until his early death in 1984,
leaving behind an unfinished manuscript of the present book.
Zavaleta is often described as a forgotten or understudied figure
of the Latin American left, and yet when he is cited it is to assign to
him a position at once singular and emblematic within a certain
canon. He has been read as a ‘local’ and localist theorist of the
Bolivian social text, and the work published as Lo nacional-popular
en Bolivia is held to represent this quality most consummately, as the
most mature expression of his thought. This reading is supported by
two overlapping narratives: one at the level of a certain tradition of
 AFTERWORD # 287

the Latin American left as a whole, the other at the level of Zavaletas
individual work. Within the macronarrative of Latin Americanist
social thought, he is placed at the intersection of a discourse gov­
erned by the categories of class, people and nation, and one centred
on indigeneity, heterogeneity and subalternity. In the current schol­
arship on Zavaleta, his intellectual trajectory is conventionally
periodized into (1) a youthful, nationalist period, (2) an orthodox
Marxist period, and (3) a final, critical Marxist period in which uni­
versal (metropolitan) categories are rejected as inoperable for the
theoretical production of non-metropolitan societies.
The concept-metaphor most commonly associated with Zavaleta
and cited to situate him at the threshold of a passage from a tradi­
tional Marxist left to a discourse aligned with the struggles of indige­
nous movements is that of abigarramiento, translated here sometimes
simply as ‘heterogeneity’ or, in its adjectival form, following existing
English citations of the term, as ‘motley’. Abigarramiento refers to the
coexistence of multiple modes of production and multiple concep­
tions of the world within a single national territory and, therefore,
complicates the sequential and deterministic modes-of-production
narrative and constitutes an obstacle to the methods of both modern
social-scientific analysis and liberal democratic politics premised on
the existence of a more or less unified national citizenry. The Bolivian
social formation, for Zavaleta, is abigarrada because precapitalist
(feudal) or noncapitalist (Andean communitarian’) social relations
persist within the space claimed by a formally capitalist nation-state.
As a concept that supplements those received from European
social theory to designate the specificity of a peripheral society, abi­
garramiento (too readily taken to stand for Zavaletas theoretical
apparatus as a whole) tends to be read in a vindicatory key, as m ul­
ticultural diversity or least as a force of anticolonial resistance. Even
Luis Tapia, the most prominent scholar of Zavaletas work, who cor­
rectly identifies and refutes the multiculturalist interpretation,
nonetheless remains within a localist framework, placing Zavaleta
288 • ANNE FREELAND

in a pivotal but intermediary position in a progression from

metropolitan to thoroughly local thought (see The Production of
Local Knowledge, translated for Elsewhere Texts by Alison Spedding,
forthcoming from Seagull Books). Walter Mignolo, writing from
the US academy, situates Zavaleta in an early stage in a process
of epitemic decolonization—he marks a break from m etropoli­
tan orthodoxy but falls short of a fully local expression.1 The bio-
bibliographical narrative of a passage from nationalism to orthodoxy
to a more critical, original, and therefore authentic perspective like­
wise represents a dialectical development that ends in a vindication
of a regionalist disciplinary demarcation.
This double schematic frame is not unfounded and it is not with­
out value, but it is necessarily reductive and has served certain forms
of appropriation and instrumentalization of Zavaletas thought. Every
translation implies a challenge to this kind of fetishization of the
local, even as it recognizes its own inevitable insufficiency. Zavaleta
indeed insists upon the necessity of a methodological modification—
beginning with a historicist grounding and qualification of abstract
categories—in social inquiry in peripheral’ or ‘motley’ societies. He
does so almost apologetically at first (in the prologue to this book, he
writes: ‘In defence of this method it must be said that no social science
is possible otherwise in a country like Bolivia’),2but his text comes to
suggest that this method is itself generalizable—that attention to his­
tory, to the singular, to contingency, to the epistemic ruptures that
occur in moments of crisis, to what escapes every model, should
inform the study of any society. The epigraph to the first chapter of
the book, like the title itself, after all, is a citation of Gramsci; Zavaleta

1 ‘The colonial matrix of power was introduced after Zavaleta Mercado died
(and of course, Zavaletas contribution fueled that conceptualization) [ . . . ]
the tensions juggled in a conceptual apparatus inherited from Karl Marx and
Antonio Gramsci, but growing out of Bolivian society’ (Walter Mignolo, ‘On
Subalterns and Other Agencies’, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy
8[4] [2005]: 381-407; here p. 397).
2 See p. 1 of this volume.
 AFTERWORD • 289

situates himself within a Marxist tradition that is already at once

critical—in the deep sense of the term and not in the sense of fac­
tiousness, apostasy, or even transcendence that is sometimes implied
by the localist scholarship—and committed to the (always imperfect)
translatability of theoretical categories. This translation is offered to
the reader, then, in the hope that it will be received as an invitation
to learn from a particular historical process with Zavaleta, rather than
about an insular local history and its specific intellectual expression.

Context and Afterlife

Between the 1960s and 80s, an academic Latin Americanism of the
left was constructed largely by a community of exiles—intellectuals
displaced and brought together by the US-backed military dictator­
ships that had seized power in much of the region. One of the central
discourses that pervaded the field was that of dependency theory, in
its varying kinds and degrees of articulation with Marxist thought.3
It is largely against dependency theory—and therefore against a
certain structuralism4—that Zavaletas ‘localism’ is directed; he main­
tains that a history of a country like Bolivia—even if one predomi­
nantly marked by defeat, oppression and stagnation—can be written

3 The foundational text of dependency theory is Argentine economist Raul

Prebischs ‘The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal
Problems’ (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, 1950);
among the most influential scholars of the Marxist strain is the Germ an-
American economist and sociologist Andre G under Frank (see Capitalism
and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York; Monthly Review Press,
1967]).
4 World-systems theory (see, in particular, the work of Immanuel Wallerstein
and Giovanni Arrighi) builds upon dependency theory in a away that illum i­
nates the affinity with structuralist thought; the periphery is conceived
only in relation to the centre, and vice versa. But the claim o f the effectivity
of local history (undetermined by the colonial power or neocolonial metro-
pole) also challenges the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser or Nicos
Poulantzas, which seeks to formulate a theory of social reproduction devoid
of all historicism.
290 • ANNE FREELAND

from within, without giving priority to the coercion of external con­

ditions, which is not to say without acknowledging their force. At a
time when Marxism in Latin America was to a great extent synony­
mous with the thought of the French philosopher Louis Althusser,
Zavaleta speaks of interpellation—an Althusserian concept of ideo­
logical ‘hailing’—with an emphasis on subjectivity rather than
subjection; on the indigenous as subject or nucleus of a ‘national-
popular’ interpellation with the 1780 uprising led by Tupac Amaru
II, for example, but also on the active intersubjectivity of the inter­
pellated masses. The epistemic constraints of structural position
within a global order are taken for granted, and it is the possibility
of rupture and of a reorganization of these conditions, which are nec­
essarily both limiting and enabling, that Zavaleta is interested in
examining.
We read his text now from the perspective of a different theo­
retical and political conjuncture. Zavaleta wrote within a discourse
marked by a negation of the social productivity of local histories;
he is now also used as a prefiguration of a nationalist identitarian
teleology.

Bolivia, 1879-1934: The War of the Pacific,

the Federal Revolution and the Chaco War
In the prologue of the manuscript bearing the title Elementos para
una historia de lo nacional-popularen Bolivia: 1879-1980 (my trans­
lation, Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879-
1980, is a rough pragmatic equivalent),5 Zavaleta writes that he

5 The manuscript was first published in book form in Mexico (by Siglo XXI)
under the title Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (The National-Popular in
Bolivia) in 1986, and has been republished under the same title in 2013 by
Plural in Bolivia, in Volume 2 of Zavaletas complete works, scrupulously
edited and annotated by Mauricio Souza. I have chosen not to abbreviate the
original title of the manuscript as the Spanish editors do, since neither the
rudimentariness conveyed by the term elementos nor the reference to the his­
torical are without significance. I also think it is worth keeping the dates that
 AFTERWORD • 291

intends to conduct a theoretical inquiry into ‘the national-popular

in Bolivia, that is, the connection between what Weber called social
democratization and state form’, grounded in a study of Bolivian his­
tory during the period between 1952 (the so-called National Revo­
lution) and 1980 (just four years prior to Zavaletas death, and a
moment that he identifies elsewhere as one of general crisis6), adding
that 'its causal explanation will bring us back to the War of the Pacific
(1879-83)’.7 The three chapters he wrote address the War of the
Pacific, the Federal War (1898-99; also known as the Federal Revo­
lution) and the Chaco War (1932-35), the last identified in the final
sentence of the manuscript as a condition of possibility o f the ‘mul­
titude of 1952’, and, therefore, of the ‘state of 1952’. The book we have
ends at its intended point of departure.
Since Zavaleta assumes a reader familiar with Bolivian history,
and only selectively provides narrative accounts of the events that
form the basis of his analysis, I hope it will be helpful to attempt at
least a rudimentary outline of the historical background here.
In 1878, Bolivia imposed a small export tax on the Chilean
nitrate operations that dominated the economy of its coastal region
and threatened to expropriate the Antofagasta Nitrate & Railway
Company when it would not comply. The Chilean army occupied
the territory, launching the War of the Pacific that ended in the
annexation of the Atacama Desert by Chile, leaving Bolivia land­
locked. This territorial amputation still weighs heavily in the national
imaginary today, and Zavaleta uses the event to illustrate a radical
absence of the the relation that he proposes to examine between the
social corpus and the state. A state that had achieved the autonomous
subjectivity necessary to act in its own national interest and that had

Zavaleta chose to frame his study, which betray its unfinished condition as
well as a gap between the book imagined in the prologue and one that clearly
had taken a different course.
6 ‘Las masas en noviembre’, discussed at the end of this Afterword.

7 See p. 1 of this volume.

292 • ANNE FREELAND

built structures of social mediation through which to mobilize its

population, he argues, could never have suffered such a defeat.
Zavaletas account of this failure of the Bolivian oligarchic (and
‘xenophilic’) state—against which the discourse of the state of 1952
would be constructed—while sometimes resonant with a whole
genre of nationalist Latin American historiography on the period, is
not organized by the same Manichean principles. He writes with a
sometimes passionate contempt for his subjects—the leading players
of what he calls the oligarchic caste—and yet without for an instant
falling into reductive moralization. His analysis of the conflict serves,
in the first place, to elucidate the concept of the ‘social optimum’
(óptimo social also called ecuación), Zavaletas term for the state-
society relation proper to what Gramsci calls the integral state,
through its conspicuous absence. While Zavaleta acknowledges his
debt to Gramsci, he warns against the assumption of a Eurocentric
world-historical teleology that, he claims, underlies Gramscis con­
cept of the ‘Western state, in which there is a ‘proper relation to civil
society, an organized system of mediations. This should alert us to
the difference between Zavaletas critique of the oligarchic state as
non-national and that of a ‘stagisf Marxism (which of course is not
Gramscis either) that sees the bourgeois nationalist revolution as the
immediate task of ‘backward’ (precapitalist) societies. It is equally
important to keep in mind that a high social optimum, although it
implies a military advantage, carries no inherent virtue.
In Zavaleta’s concrete historical analysis, a high optimum is
shown to enable an authoritarian state (that of late-nineteenth-
century Chile) to bolster its economy in a moment of economic crisis
(a result of Canadian and Argentine competition in the world wheat
market and Spanish and US copper) through the outright conquest
and annexation of its neighbours’ resource-rich territories, while in
his theoretical exposition of the concept by way of Gramsci in the
same chapter, it refers to an epistemic apparatus through which the
liberal state reads and adapts to its shifting social base in order to
 AFTERWORD * 293

maintain the existing structure of domination; Zavaletas examina­

tion of the failure of the Bolivian state, which is contrasted alternately
with both, does not readily suggest a desirable alternative and
attempts to read something like a prescriptive programme here are
ill-founded.
If the War of the Pacific was what Zavaleta calls an interstate war,
that is, one confined to the level of the state (at least for its van­
quished, Bolivia and Peru), the Federal War of 1889-99 began as an
intrastate war between opposing factions within the Bolivian oli­
garchic caste but ultimately came to reveal ‘the vital core of the
paradigmatic conflicts of civil society’.8 Against the ruling Conserva­
tive Party dominated by silver-mining interests and centred in Sucre
and Potosí, the Liberal Party based in La Paz was gaining strength
with the support of the rising tin magnates that had begun to outpace
the old silver elite. The Liberal regionalist revolt that sought to estab­
lish the thriving city of La Paz as the capital, however, would not have
been able to defeat the national army without resorting to an unprece­
dented political and military strategy: an alliance with indigenous
forces. The Liberal, Federalist leader General José Manuel Pando had
gained the confidence of the indigenous communities that had been
under assault for decades,9and the La Paz faction was able to secure
the upper hand with the help of an indigenous army commanded by
the the Aymara leader Pablo Zárate ‘Willka’. But rather than waiting
for a Liberal victory for Pando to make good on his promise to
restore communal land rights, Zárates forces incorporated their own
political programme into their military campaign, reclaiming lands
and assailing creole towns not fighting with the Conservative troops
(most famously in the village of Mohoza) and finally occupying the
city of Oruro. After the Conservative leader Severo Fernández
Alonso fled to Antofagasta (now in Chile) and a Liberal victory was

8 See p. 19 of this volume.

9 Most recently, since the large-scale expropriation o f com m unal lands initi­
ated by president Mariano Melgarejo in 1864.
294 • ANNE FREELAND

secure, Pando sought a swift peace with his Southern counterparts

and turned to the suppression of what creole society as a whole now
perceived as an infinitely more terrible threat: the indiada (a deroga­
tory term evoking an undifferentiated and hostile mass, which I
have sometimes rendered as the Indian hordes or Indian mob). Zárate
and other indigenous leaders were executed, privatization and expro­
priation of communal lands continued, and the political class
regrouped, now with La Paz as the de facto seat of the federal gov­
ernment while Sucre retained its status as the official capital, an
arrangement symbolic of the truce or stalemate between the factions
of the white and mestizo elite still in force today. If the initial lesson
of the Federal War was the internal weakness and disunity of the
dominant bloc, its true eloquence for Zavaleta lies in the revelation
that what cohesion it could muster derived from the construction
and exclusion of the indiada as its constitutive enemy.
Bolivia entered another border dispute in 1927, this time with
Paraguay, the only other landlocked country in the Americas and,
like Bolivia, one of the poorest. Zavaleta maintains that the territory
in question here—the region of the Rio de la Plata basin called the
Gran Chaco—was not ‘socially incorporated’, that is, unlike the
Atacama Desert that separated the rest of the country from the sea,
it was not an integral part of the Bolivian social formation and should
never have been the object of a war; moreover, a diplomatic solution
was entirely feasible. Instead, a bloody military campaign was
launched in 1932 and when a ceasefire was finally negotiated in 1935,
most of the disputed region went to Paraguay. Here the incompe­
tence of the government of the Liberal president Daniel Salamanca
in managing the war—in Zavaletas account a result of his discon­
nection from the reality on the ground and disregard for the lives of
the almost exclusively indigenous and poor mestizo troops—created
a rift between the state and the army; this implied at once a more
explicit division between the state and its social base and a division
internal to the ruling class. This dissension, Zavaleta argues, was a
necessary condition for the revolution of 1952. But the lack of an
 AFTERWORD • 295

organic relation between society and the state was already evident,
in this analysis, at least since the War of the Pacific; the difference
here is that a large portion of the population was effectively mobi­
lized, and it is this mobilization that gave rise to a collective subject
(Zavaleta would say an intersubjectivity) capable of apprehending its
exclusion and thus of producing an organic crisis and ultimately an
alternative hegemonic project—that of the ‘state of 1952’.

Constitution and Crisis o f the ‘Revolutionary Nationalist*State,

1952-79
It seems clear that had Zavaleta lived to finish the book, it would not
have coincided with the one imagined in the prologue, since after
almost 300 pages of groundwork on the causal explanations’ of his
subject and possibly only one chapter remaining (more on which
below), he had not yet arrived at its beginning. Yet the events of the
chapters or chapter that remain(s) unwritten—which would have cov­
ered the period of Bolivian history that Zavaleta lived through and in
which he was an active participant—are nonetheless central to the sub­
stance and texture of the book even in the form in which it exists and
must therefore be included in a discussion of its historical framing.
Mauricio Souza proposes that all of Zavaletas books can be read
as chapters in a biography of the state of 1952,10*14and this process can
indeed be conceived as a complex and polyvalent figure for the for­
mation of an intersubjectivity or the (frustrated) emergence of a self-
determined popular collectivity in relation to which prior and
subsequent events can be read. The absent centre of The National-
Popular in Bolivia is an event that came to represent a préfiguration
of something that would remain in the mode of the to come. The
state of 1952’ names at once the nationalization and democratization

10 ‘A puntes sobre la obra de René Zavaleta Mercado (Notes on the W ork o f

René Zavaleta Mercado) in René Zavaleta Mercado, Obra compléta, vol. 1 (La
Paz: Plural, 2011). In a 1983 interview, Zavaleta says that he has ‘suffered no
disillusionment at all* with regard to what he believed in 1952, w hen he was
14 years old; that his position has not changed but has only developed.
296 • ANNE FREELAND

of the state and the reconstruction of its oligarchic core. These

moments can be understood sequentially—but also as simultaneous.
There was unquestionably a real moment of democratization and an
emergence of new political subjects; the same event, however, was
also from the beginning a process of adaptation on the part of the
political class.
Tapia cites an outline in one of Zavaletas notebooks that includes
a fourth and final chapter, ‘The Song of Maria Barzola, after the mar­
tyred leader of the march that ended in the Catavi Massacre of 21
December 1942.11We have no further clue as to its intended contents.
Tapia proposes, however, that we might read one of Zavaletas last
essays, ‘The Masses in November (‘Las masas en noviembre’), as a
stand-in for this final chapter.12 Taking up this astute suggestion, I
conclude this Afterword with a brief reflection on the present book
in light of this almost contemporary text that takes us, at least
chronologically, (almost) to its projected point of completion, to the
general strike of November 1979.
Zavaletas analysis here indeed supplements and recasts that of
The National-Popular in Bolivia in its existing form, which is struc­
tured as a reading of the crisis of the Liberal oligarchic state that led
to the constitution of the state of 1952; ‘The Masses in November’
focuses on the crisis of the state of 1952 (which is at once a ‘recom­
position of the alliance of 1952’ between the workers and the peas­
antry) as the opening that will lead to a hegemonic configuration
still to come. The conceptual guiding thread designated in the 12

11 Luis Tapia, La producción del conocimiento local (The Production o f Local

Knowledge) (La Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores, 2002), p. 335. Tapia told me
in a email that he recalls seeing the outline in a notebook in a drawer in the
Zavaleta family’s home but does not have a copy of it; Zavaletas son Diego
tells me he has no knowledge of the notebook. There is a reference in the third
chapter of The National-Popular in Bolivia to the ‘following chapters’, in the
plural (specifically to say that these will address the state constructed against
the oligarchic one, which is the subject of the first three chapters).
12 Tapia, La producción del conocimiento local, p. 336.
 AFTERWORD • 297

prologue to this book is the optimum’, which is understood as the

constitutive relation of the integral state in the Gramscian sense, and
in the final pages is equated with hegemony, insofar as its deficiency
in Bolivia supplied the conditions of possibility of crisis; at the centre
o f‘The Masses in November’ is an exposition of the moment of crisis
itself as productive epistemological opening. Each of these concepts
contains the other, and each is prominent in both texts. But the shift
in focus from constitution to crisis, and the pattern of repetition
(with a difference) configured by their conjunction, suggests some
useful points of entry into this book and Zavaleta’s work as a whole.
In the first place, it takes us back to the question of theory in and
o f ‘motley’ societies. In ‘Las masas’, Zavaleta presents the specificity
of local theory not as a negation of the universalizing drive of
metropolitan theory, but as antidote to the dismissal of the rest of
the world as untheorizable, which can only serve a reactionary pol­
itics: ‘All this [the theory of crisis as epistemological method] is nec­
essary to controvert the reactionary theory that seeks to segregate
intelligible countries from unintelligible ones*. The decolonialist
appropriation of Zavaleta as a figure of vindication of the local can
be seen as the mirror image of this kind o f ‘segregation*. The second
and final point from ‘The Masses in November* that I will mention
here is that the production of (self-)knowledge through crisis does
not amount to a passage from unconsciousness to a final, transparent
self-consciousness; rather, it is a moment of substitution of one rep­
resentation of the self in relation to the world by another. In the best
of cases, this new relation is more democratic than the one it replaces.
Critical knowledge, that is, knowledge in and through crisis, is a pro­
cess and not something that is acquired once and for all. This should
not be forgotten in reading Zavaleta now, as the increasingly obvious
failures of the electoral left of the so-called Pink Tide in Bolivia and
Latin America enters a new hegemonic crisis.
Primarily in terms of racialized caste’ rather than class, the ques­
tion of gender is completely absent here. A similar process of critique
298 • ANNE FREELAND

for the present must take gendered power relations into account
in supplementing the current discourse of indigeneity. For an anti­
colonial feminist perspective, the reader might turn to the work of
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the most robust scholar of contemporary
indigenous movements in Bolivia and of their cooptation from both
the neoliberal and left-populist positions.
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