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Culture, Theory and Critique

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The Mirror of Speculative Leftism: Álvaro GarcíaLinera and the Incalculability of Politics

Jaime Rodríguez Matos

To cite this article: Jaime Rodríguez Matos (2015) The Mirror of Speculative Leftism: ÁlvaroGarcía Linera and the Incalculability of Politics, Culture, Theory and Critique, 56:3, 349-365,DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2015.1059288

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1059288

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The Mirror of Speculative Leftism: Alvaro GarcıaLinera and the Incalculability of Politics

Jaime Rodrıguez Matos

Abstract In this piece I argue that the unfolding projection of the state-form asevent, such as it is currently underway in thought about Bolivia, assumes thetotal calculability of politics. This calculability is at odds with the very conceptof event that underwrites it from the start. The fundamental paradox is thatonce one posits the ability of the new revolutionary state to manage ‘the extinctionof exclusion’, one also introduces the image of the state as totality and as embodi-ment of the real community. Thus, another name for calculability in what followsis the ability of the state to fully account for all in the community. Whatever thisstate might be, it should be noted that it stands in stark contradiction to any post-Althusserian theory of Marxism, where Marxism is revealed as inseparable fromwhat deviates. Thus, to detect deviations from a proper form is to fall back on anidea of politics not determined by the unfolding events of history but overdeter-mined by an abstract idea of what can be calculated. The texts of Alvaro GarcıaLinera are of great importance in this regard, and not just as possible guidesfor what is taking place in Bolivia today.

The challenge of Marxism today

What is at issue in these pages can be seen as a contribution towards an inquiryregarding the unexpected return of the accusation of speculative leftism orleftist infantilism, which, I venture here, is part and parcel of what can becalled, in psychoanalytical terms, the denegated speculative impulse oftoday’s hard line political thought and praxis: which is to say the speculativeleftism that is able to carry on only by leveling the accusation of speculativeleftism against others. For if there is a defining characteristic of the speculativeleftist it is that he or she believes there is the possibility of total calculability inpolitics. The accusation of speculative leftism mirrors that which it critiques. Ishould make it clear from the start that this essay is not interested in diagnos-ing a denegated form of speculative leftism in order to enact or demand afurther purification. On the contrary, this essay claims that the challenge forMarxism today is how to think through the idea that, unless it begins to under-stand itself as inseparable form deviation and, by extension, as one with whatcannot be calculated, it will only ever be a theory of the compulsion of (mod-ernizing) repetition. What would it mean for Marxism to move beyond the

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015Vol. 56, No. 3, 349–365, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1059288

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opposition between a proper path and its rightist and leftist deviations? I closeby proposing that it is only by moving beyond the idea of deviations thatMarxism can leave behind all politics of calculation and of the organizingmyth of ‘the extinction of exclusion’ – a politics, that is, which perhaps willnot be recognized by Marxism as politics at all, but which for that verysame reason stands as its own internal challenge today.

To what extent does the unfolding projection of the state-form as event, incontemporary theoretical considerations on Bolivia, assume the total calcul-ability of politics? To what extent can this question have any bearing on theprogressive politics of that country? I want to think through what I take tobe a fundamental paradox of the Bolivian experiment currently underway,which is that once one posits the ability of the new revolutionary state tomanage, in the words of Alvaro Garcıa Linera, ‘the extinction of exclusion’,one also introduces the image of the state as totality and as embodiment ofthe real community. Thus, another name for calculability in what follows isthe ability of the state to fully account for all in the community.

Is it possible to derail the real community?

In a text from 1991, Alvaro Garcıa Linera, under the name Qhananchiri andglossing Marx’s The German Ideology, writes that the state is at once a realand illusory community. ‘As Marx pointed out’, writes Garcıa Linera,

the state contains in its interior, always subjected but present, rep-resentations . . . of classes other than the dominant one. [Thus] onecan speak of the state as ‘illusory community’ [representing] thewhole of society, and why this appearance . . . is real, necessary;[the state is] buttressed materially on the associative and organiz-ational necessities of the masses (hence the ‘community’), but,founded on the vital need that the dominant class has of subordinat-ing [the masses . . .] to its exploitative interests (hence the illusoryaspect of the community). (Qhananchiri 1991: 65–66)

He further explains:

This means that the illusory community is not a mere lie that could beexposed by means of ‘consciousness’ alone. For this reason it is anillusory community that can only be toppled down and supersededby a real community, taking as a point of departure the real materialistcritique of the revolution, which would demolish the materiality ofthe illusion. (Qhananchiri 1991: 65–66)

While there is the state as ‘illusory community’, and this illusion depends onthe subjection of the classes that are not dominant, the illusion rests only on theside of representation. The classes that are not dominant are not truly rep-resented, yet the material basis that they provide make of the illusion of a com-munity something more than a mere illusion. The state is a community as awhole in so far as it passes through the lives of all that are involved in theprocess of guaranteeing the continued dominance of the elite. This state

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does the biding for the dominant class, but in the name of the whole commu-nity. The real community would no longer be the community that is part of thestate as a resource for the dominant class. The real community alone can dis-mantle the material reality of the exploitative state. But this demolitionrequires more than ideological intervention. Thus, the illusory communityhas a point where its lie about representation does touch the material con-ditions of the community as a whole. The basis for this material illusion, ofthe torsion which allows for the lie to contain a degree of (deceptive) truth,rests on the claim that nothing is excluded from the state and its reach, irre-spective of how that reach affects the various parts it recollects.

Would it be possible to use this as a model for justifying and criticizing, atonce, what is happening today in Bolivia? As a template for a justification, itwould work precisely because the rehabilitation of the state as a plurinationalversion of a ‘real community’ is what has allowed the current administrationto position itself as the true expression of the whole of Bolivia (Garcıa Linera2011: 7). As a model for a possible critique, it would entail pointing to anythingthat the Bolivian state excludes from its field of representation, thus offeringmaterial evidence to the effect that the state without exclusions is in fact anillusion.1 But what thought-praxis will position itself to demolish the materi-ality of its illusion? Has Marxist discursivity completely appropriated thattask? And if not, what is this other politics, beyond the calculation of thewhole, which keeps escaping from the Marxist purview?

However, before attempting to confront any of those questions, it will benecessary to take a further look at the remarkable malleability offered by thisunderstanding of the state. Here we have a tool that can serve to underminethose who assail the state – as when Garcıa Linera writes of the ‘naıve’ and‘primitive’ desire of the anarchists who forget that this institution is alreadya universal instance of the community that traverses us all, and therefore hasno outside (2007: 57, n. 1). But it can serve, on the contrary, to legitimize therevolution as the real movement that abolishes the current state of things,yielding a ‘real community’. The place of the socialist thesis regarding the with-ering away of the state is shuffled in interesting ways in this context. Nothingdetermines that it should be a state that necessarily follows the water and gaswars, along with all the other insurrectionary moments prior to the democraticelection of Morales and the MAS, but that is what did happen. In the shift fromthe street protest to the consolidation of the party and its electoral victory,the state needed to take a revolutionary position as the real community ofthe communist horizon.2 Furthermore, this model has a strategic theoreticaltask. The illusion that is real, ‘the actual state of things’, is safeguarded froma ‘merely’ theoretical confrontation, other than the theoretical-praxis of

1And an illusion which, in its broad outlines, is not that different from the socialiststate after the Brezhnevian constitution of 1977 – a state of the people as a whole. Theproclamation that what actually existed was such an all-inclusive state made it poss-ible to claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer a stage to be sup-pressed. For, as soon as the state is the state of ‘the people as a whole’, there is noneed for its disappearance (Fernandez Estrada and Guanche 2010).

2Hylton and Thompson write:

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Marxism itself. Materially determined, it must be materially brought downlest one fall into the traps of consciousness and intentionality, of an idealistand theologically inflected subjectivity enmeshed in the mysteries of thecommodity.

The reversibility of the state therefore mirrors the reversibility of the func-tion of theory/praxis in the Marxist text. Garcıa Linera, following but qualify-ing Althusser’s identification of The German Ideology as the text that marks thetrue epistemological revolution in Marx, posits that it is correct to claim thatafter 1845 Marxism had already constructed its own terrain of development.Against Althusser’s rigid distinction between ideology and science, GarcıaLinera posits that there are no certainties to be found in that new ‘continent’.He explains: Marxism, insofar as it is a product of the situation it critiques,

is accosted . . . by contrary forces that are not only opposed to it andattempt to deform its initial purpose, but also, because of this, it ispermanently hounded through all of its interstices, its doubts andproblems by impulses and interests that try to derail the sense andthe character of its unfolding. The history of Marxism is, then, alsothe history of class struggle; and just as in this struggle, taken as awhole, capitalist society after a certain point in its development hascreated the social, spiritual and material forces that open the possibilityof general social emancipation, within Marxism, mutatis mutandis,. . . there opens the possibility, but only the possibility, of its theoreticaland practical self-development [su autodesarrollo teorico-practico].(Qhananchiri 1991: 53, n. 1)

In this passage, the limits of Marxist theory/praxis are exposed, but only tomake it more expedient to be on guard against its falsification – thus alsoopening the possibility of an ever more radically correct, non-deviational,self-unfolding of its theory/praxis. This is a missed opportunity, for itwould be possible to take the insight one step further and claim the possibilitythat Marxism opens is closed upon the (re)appearance of speculation on its fal-sification/verification. For what Garcıa Linera is aiming at here can also beunderstood in such a way that the possibility opened is also that of Marxisttheory and praxis coming to terms with the radical impurity that inhabits it,making anything like its proper sense and character impossible. Once weare on the lookout for de-formations of any sort, the possibility Marxismopens is gone.

‘No one – least of all Morales and Garcıa Linera – claimed electoral victory

would fundamentally alter capitalist relations of property and production. Itwas expected to modify the rules of neoliberal capitalism in favor of a state

that would work to improve the welfare of all its citizens, especially the poor

rural and urban majority . . .’ (2007: 133)

The idea of the ‘real community’ depends on the possibility of the state addressing the

needs of all.

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The state as the return of what never left

The return of the Bolivian plebs was the return of what had never left.(Vega 2013)

I take the above epigraph from a recent talk at Texas A&M University by OscarVega, a member of the disbanded Comuna collective from Bolivia. In it he refer-ences a 2000 publication that dealt directly with the mass irruptions of thatyear in his country – El retorno de la Bolivia plebeya (Garcıa Linera et al.2000). In the 2013 talk, however, Vega’s recourse to the category of the plebswas an attempt to explain not only the water and gas wars and other eventsof that period but also the current political changes taking place particularlyafter the electoral victories of Morales (2005, 2009) and the new constitution(2006–2009). The plebs were there and nevertheless had to return. Howshould we understand this return of what never left? The question is signifi-cant if we consider that what has to return while being present is the possi-bility of the real community.

Hylton and Thompson have offered that in the case of Bolivia, this returnexceeds what they call a Marxian understanding of the past, in which historyis what has to be ‘done with’ in order for the new to emerge in full force.3 Thissets up the broad contrast the authors want to establish between ‘Bolshevik’and ‘anarchist’ categories once they pass through the Quechua-Aymara‘native tongue’ of the revolts, in which revolution turns into pachakuti, theterm for ‘a profound turning or transformation of the world’ (2007: 28). Therelation to the past that pachakuti invokes is opposed to the idea of a radicalbreak with the nightmare of all the dead generations that weigh on theminds of the living (such as Marx imagined it in The 18th Brumaire . . . in 1852):

The Bolivian revolutionary process has drawn much of its power byre-creating the past symbolically so as to transform the present –making history not only in the sense of influencing the course ofevents, but also of producing the meaning of events . . . [R]evolution-ary processes today feature reconnection with a long-negated, under-ground history that has scarcely begun to be written. The point, then,is not to bury the dead, but to rouse the spirits of the ancestors so thatthey may return to the world to animate present-day struggles.(Hylton and Thompson 2007: 29–30)

Hylton and Thompson wish to show that the Bolivian experience from 2000 upuntil the election of Morales in 2005 exceeded all conceptual frameworks. On

3Garcıa Linera, writing as Qhananchiri, though noting that this is not always thecase in Marx’s work, also claims that ultimately Marx will put more emphasis on thefuture than in the past: ‘Peasant action within social revolution . . . is a giant noveltythat Marx himself will point out, not without a certain self-critique regarding someof his previous positions: ‘The social revolution of the XIX century cannot take itspoetry from the past,’ just as Marx himself was tempted to do in many occasions,‘but only from the future’ (Qhananchiri 1991: 165; Marx’s words are from The 18thBroumaire . . . [1852]).

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the one hand, those sectors of society with a long negated history ‘gained anunprecedented degree of political representation in state government andexecutive office’ (Hylton and Thompson 2007: 27). While this might havebeen a surprise for the belated Marxist-Leninist, for the anarchists, on theother hand, the surprise consisted in the shift ‘from grassroots to national pol-itical levels’ (Hylton and Thompson 2007: 27). In both cases, the authors sum-marize, what was not expected was that radical change could take place viademocratic means rather than through insurrection.4 As Morales put it, hisvictory was a ‘revolution in democracy . . . by the ballot not the rifle’(Hylton and Thompson 2007: 27).

The real ‘event’ here, we are told, is that the word ‘revolution’ can gaintraction in the context of a democratic victory, and that communists all overthe world see in it the ‘body’ that takes the movement out of the realm ofmere ideas (e.g., Bosteels 2010; Keucheyan 2013: 10–12, 69). It is worthwhileto ponder in detail what is taking place as revolution moves toward theballot box, as with this displacement more than one thing seems to disappear– only to make another surreptitiously take its place. The first is the erasure oftheory, which turns principle into praxis without much more to say on thematter. The second is the change from a history that is event-bound and inwhich the past is simply dispensed with, ascribed to Marx, to a history inwhich the past changes the present, and subjective intervention is whatdefines the meaning of events – presented as a surpassing of Marxistthought. This change of ‘histories’ goes beyond the act of putting praxis inthe place of theory. What appears is a fully fleshed ‘good’ history withoutomissions, or, to use a phrase penned by Garcıa Linera himself: a history inwhich ‘the extinction of exclusion’ has been achieved (Garcıa Linera 2008:209). The past that is no longer erased occupies the state. With this, thechange from plebs to social movement goes through a further transformation:the social movements are now putatively embodied in Morales and the MAS,who are the expressions of a new history without omissions.

On the one hand, democratic elections and state representation turn intorevolution. On the other, a new opening is made through which insurrection isfolded onto a politically stable valence, as it no longer puts the democraticapparatus itself in danger. The recent upheavals against Maduro in Venezuelacould be read as the first manifestation that bears this out from the other end ofthe political spectrum. In Bolivia, the historical specificity of the resultsobscures this neutralization of insurrection, but only because the continuitybetween plebs – social movements – MAS was assumed, and assumed as atriumph of the left. However, it is now clear that the same insurrectionary

4For an explanation of the need for insurrection if the revolution is to be real, seeGarcıa Linera’s exposition of Marx’s early writings:

‘The social Revolution cannot be a simple change, nor a reshuffling of the old

social order, it has to dissolve it down to its roots including the ‘old power’

[i.e., real revolution is not merely political, such as a democratic change ofparty], and for this is necessary violence and destruction.’ (Qhananchiri

1991: 10)

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tactics can be adopted by forces invested in securing sexist, racial and econ-omic hierarchies as well as by leftist anti-state factions. And this unsettlesthe legitimacy of any one manager of the state without having to go to thepoint of negotiating a violent rupture with the democratic or political appar-atus already in effect. (Whether elections can accomplish this withoutfurther trouble remains an open question throughout Latin America.) Regard-less of the ‘content’ of the insurrection, the upshot is a rehabilitation of themyth that the state is more real than illusory as the expression of ‘community’.

The state as event

The victory of Morales and Garcıa Linera not only marks the triumph of ‘theleft’ (though it is also that). Above and beyond that, it underlines the split andcontentious historicity of the left into positions that will not be easily harmo-nised and that will only be erased at the exorbitant price of ending ‘the revolu-tion’. The form that this harmonisation or erasure takes on today in LatinAmerica is directly tied to the question of the calculability of leftist politicsas the base for revolutionary rhetoric. And calculability is never more atstake than when it is a matter of avoiding disaster: it is within this state ofaffairs, under such and such conditions of authority, that we shall haveavoided the apocalypse (whether that is a trope for a military coup or forthe return of the neoliberal vanguard – and in the event of the latter itwould also be the return of what had never left Bolivia). To what extent canthe ‘revolutionary state’ in Bolivia maintain a course that does not reducethe split within the left (the fissure that prevents the verification of true politi-cal action or victory) into a variant of the conflict with the capitalist right?

The task is equally arduous for all sides in this situation. It is not that thefield can be divided without problems into left and right, for what the ques-tions here attempt to bring to the fore is the need to avoid reducing eitherthe ‘radical’ or the ‘statist’ ‘lefts’ to a right that is putatively struggling inBolivia. The reduction of either of these lefts to the basic position of homologywith the right (a proposition that has a long history within Marxism-Leninismand its diagnoses of infantilism) rests on the idea that the totality of the politi-cal field can be accounted for without remainder, calculated in its entirety,when it is in fact the accountability of the whole that is at issue today.

In 2000, when The Return of the Bolivian Plebs was published, the problemunder consideration was a very specific one: how to understand the politicalvalence of the masses that had taken to the streets. The ‘plebs’, then, were ima-gined as the multitude acting on the outside of all apparatuses of governabil-ity: ‘a multiplicity and plurality of singularities, openness to the innumerable,undefined and undetermined’ (Garcıa Linera et al. 2000: 9–10). This emphasison the singular and unformed went hand in hand with a turn toward the voca-bulary and conceptualization of a radical historical interruption: ‘The richnessof the autopoiesis of the multitude is found in the motley field of possiblesingularities, which conform precisely the order of the event’ (Garcıa Lineraet al. 2000: 9–10, compare 94–95). This is the material from which freedomwill be achieved. From this substrate of ‘actual history’ emerges a ‘spirit’that will remain a constant reference even when it is marshaled in the nameof the state later on, but which here serves as the material ‘from which

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utopias are constructed . . . This is the reason why the rebellious present con-vokes the past as well as the future; the ghosts of our dead come to us from thefuture’ (Garcıa Linera et al. 2000: 10). These dead that come from the futurewere imagined as an un-forming tension against ‘governability’ (GarcıaLinera et al. 2000: 11). To put this in terms of the state form, what was happen-ing went beyond the collectivization of identities that the state could recognizeand manage.

In 2013, when Vega spoke at Texas, the situation was quite different. Thereference to the plebs was intended to illuminate the occupation of the state bya new political actor. In the new context, the battle was now one of ideas. AsGarcıa Linera had already said in 2008, in conversation with Stefanoni,Ramırez and Svampa:

Between 2000 and 2005 the indigenous-peasant [agenda] changedeverything, it directed everything, and now there is recoil; we haveto reposition once again the indigenous-peasant and its articulationwith the middle class. And that is the great grievance of the intellec-tuals. The social movements mark the historical north; even the righthas to recognize that. But one has to be alert, we won the government,but we can lose the battle of ideas. (Stefanoni et al. 2008: 84)

In the same conversation, we are told that it is impossible for a state to sup-plant a mobilized society, yet it is important for him to emphasize the limitsof those movements, and to present an image of the state as the materialtrace of a universalist movement of society itself:

we have imagined that the state is not going to substitute the univers-alism of the self-organization of society, but there it is, the trace of thatuniversality, of the struggles; then . . . a revolutionary State can extenda bridge between the different societal constructions in their momentof ascent up to the new universalist ascent of society. (Stefanoni et al.2008: 81)

Garcıa Linera’s reading of Marx comes to the fore in this regard. In large part,he attributes the tension between Marx’s text and its reception in LatinAmerica to an inattention to Marx’s emphasis on the vitality of the masses:the people, in their sure movements as an internal impulse of affirmation, intheir spirit – that is what is decisive in the national formation of a people(Garcıa Linera 2008: 45). In 2011, the vice president posited this as a fait accom-pli. Garcıa Linera’s essay ‘The Creative Tensions of the Revolution’ opens withthe following assertion: ‘The Bolivian people have consolidated its historicalunity around a single Statal, economic and social project’ (Garcıa Linera2011: 7). What becomes of the state in this context? The short answer is thatit becomes a site to be explored and interrogated as to its revolutionary orevental potential. Here it will not do to invoke the idea of ‘the coldest of allcold monsters’, to use Nietzsche’s phrase (2006: 34). For to imagine the statein this fashion is to beg the most fundamental question of the Bolivian exper-iment. In Bolivia today (but also outside, for others observing and thinkingabout what is happening there), what is being tested is the idea that the

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state is an integral part of the unfolding of revolutionary change. Oscar Vegahas offered one of the boldest formulations of this wager:

They [the scholars who wish to think that the state can only take oneform, thus dismissing the novelty of the Bolivian experiment] teach us. . . that the State is universal and that therefore its . . . logic lies beyondgeography, politics and time. For this reason, to attempt to think thatit can have other modalities and yield other alternatives is, or can be,[perceived as] scandalous by the established institutions of the think-able . . . (Vega 2010: 129)

He adds that, from the point of view of those institutions, ‘it is perverse toimagine that one can think differently, that one can aspire to a different andplural universality; this is barbarity, [they say] they are barbarians [whowould dare to imagine such a thing]’ (2010: 129). The barbarian is one whowould think of the state as an institution truly capable of expressing the uni-versal community. It is as if Hegel had it all backwards (not an unusual pos-ition to find Hegel in, in the tradition in question): the true universality ofthe state is not a matter of the unfolding of Spirit in history. Rather, it isthose who have no history who will finally redeem this cold monster fromits failed trajectory as a synthesis of the community. This is what is fundamen-tally at issue in what Vega calls ‘the return of the plebs’ seen from the point ofview, now, of the state (2010: 131). And it is these actors, the ‘barbarians’ fromthe south, who turn the meditation on the state into an event: ‘to think thatState’, he writes, is ‘a task that is not at all novel . . . The rupture lies in whoaspires [now] to it and thus wants to think and work through it’ (Vega 2010:131). It is not clear, apparently, what a state is capable of, though we knowabout some of the things that states have done and continue to do.

To put it in very abstract Badiouian terms (Badiou 2005: 93–103), what wehave to grapple with in Bolivia’s exploration is the idea that the state is nolonger a metastructure that structures twice, turning presentation into rep-resentation, and this not because the singular has been revealed to havealready operated this redoubling before the state in the ‘form’ multitude. Or,what is the same in this context, collapsing the two terms (presentation andrepresentation) and assuming that the work of one is the other, the state andthe state of the state would no longer be two different questions; the state issimply the expression of the multitude in all its plurality as what is public,the immediate presentation of the social bond.

The state as flux and as foundation

The plebs have returned to the place where they had always and had neverbeen. The state has been sundered and reshaped by this return. Everythinghinges on the possible believability of a fiction: that a structure like the Boli-vian state under the guidance of Evo Morales is in fact the expression of thewill of the all. And yet coming out of the social movements, being theexpression of their multiplicity and lack of articulation, also means to comeout of an insufficiency. The statal structure that ensues re-marks the

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insufficient ‘form’ from which it has emerged as the embodiment of order,something that is explicitly foregrounded in the recent writings of the vicepresident.

Garcıa Linera accounts for this split by invoking a state that is in tran-sition. In the gap between insurrection and a stable state power is lodgednot only the liquidity of a state in transition, but also the tropology of revolu-tion under the image of a communist horizon. For him, after the upheavals inCochabamba (2000) and El Alto (2003), a great vitality of the people was amplyin evidence, but the self-mobilization of the people presented serious limit-ations in terms of their ability to bring about communism. The well-knownpassage is worth quoting, for in it we are faced with the actual function ofthe communist horizon:

[C]ommunism will have to be constructed taking the self-organizingcapacity of society as the starting point . . . But at this moment it isclear that the [communist] horizon is not an immediate one . . .Rather, we began to see the movement with expectant eyes and desir-ous of a communist horizon [that is, soon the desire for communismwas a lens through which the actuality of the movement came to beseen as lacking], but we were serious and objective, in the socialsense of the term, when we pointed out the limitations of the move-ment. (Stefanoni et al. 2008: 75)

When Garcıa Linera enters the state, he does so with this interpretation of thepresent as his guiding light. What a state that is self-identified as revolutionarycan offer at this juncture is ‘to support as much as it is possible the unfolding ofthe autonomous organizing capacity of society, that is what is possible for aState of the left, a revolutionary State’; what the state will not do, he adds, is‘coopt and generate communitarism from above’ (Garcıa Linera 2008: 75–76). This much is correct, as it has been expropriated ‘from below’. Theentire revolutionary character of the state depends on this trope.

For Garcıa Linera, the state is always a relational phenomenon that is his-torically and politically constructed, and at times this process yields stable andpredictable hierarchies and habits. But in certain circumstances, it exposes amore unstable or formless constitution. The state, when it is in moments of‘transition’, is revealed as a ‘flux of interrelations’ (Garcıa Linera 2010: 10). Ifthe state is built with ‘bricks’, in moments of transition something else isobtained (Garcıa Linera 2010: 13). The inscription of democracy in thisrespect is the touchstone of fluidity:

Democracy is movement, flux, revocation, the expansion of thecapacity to decide . . . In the same fashion, the processes of socialdemocratization in general come not from institutional participatorystructures but from the structures of social movements that operate[se mueven] outside of the dominant political camp, in the ‘politicalunderground’ [subsuelo polıtico]. (Garcıa Linera 2013: 33)

The flux of the social movements, which emerged with full force beginningwith the ‘Water War’ in 2000, needs to be reintegrated into the flux of the

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state-in-transition, and this flux must contrast sharply with the bricks andmortar, the stony and massive stability of the traditional state: that is, the incor-poration of the movement of democracy has to be the de-structuration of thestate, at which point it would no longer be simply an apparatus of governabil-ity. The formation of a new state traverses a moment in which its fixity givesway to a ‘gelatinous’ instability (Garcıa Linera 2010: 17), which will be over-come if and when the transitory period is over:

It is evident that the arrival of a strategic stabilization of the statesystem is a process; but there is a moment, the point of political bifur-cation, in which a procedure of lasting feedback between the . . . domi-nant ideas-forces, and the administrative machine, which expressesthe correlation of forces, can be verified. (Garcıa Linera 2010: 18)

This verification concerns nothing less than the possibility of getting at the‘communal I’ of the system of liberties of which a society is capable (GarcıaLinera 2008: 331). Anything short of this would be to give up completely onthe political front, and to hand over the country to international capitalismor to what in this case amounts to much the same thing: anarchism. This isand is not just a description of a universal state that would apply, to useVega’s word, beyond geography, politics and time. Theoretically, we aretold, it is essential in order to make the communist horizon and the contoursof our present appear. But this is something that has to take place in the realmof the battle of ideas. In an important sense, the verification of the true politicalvictory will take place in that guise, but only after ideas have been transformedinto anything but theoretical speculation.

I comment on only one instance. In The Actuality of Communism, BrunoBosteels goes to great lengths to save Garcıa Linera from any possible melan-cholic reading of the MAS government as, say, an oppressive reincarnation ofthe classic socialist state, which would be a deviation to the right, solely con-cerned with economics. Any such impression (for instance: that what we aredealing with is a rehabilitation of stageism) would have to be corrected orwe risk the possibility of understanding the ‘Bolivian experiment’ as ‘aghostly spirit from the dead past’ (Bosteels 2010: 225). As Bosteels puts it,the plebeian reference in Garcıa Linera, and others, risks being confusedwith ‘a leftist and populist appeal to various names for the formless’ (Bosteels2010: 232). It is important to ask where this risk lies and why it is necessary toso emphatically re-mark it as if the historical balance depended on it.

Leftism, for Bosteels, is a tradition whose non-subjective categories putrepresentational structures in crisis: it is the ‘tradition in which political antag-onism is purified into a stark dualism that . . . undialectically pits the formlessmasses against the repressive machinery of the State’ (Bosteels 2010: 233–34).Dialectics, here, means to proffer that the state is capable of being theexpression of the formless masses. To put this in a different form, andtaking into account well-known formulas from the context of Latin Americanpolitics, the idea boils down to the opposition of a state of ‘the left’, in theabsence of which we would risk being taken over by capitalists’ designsand/or the military. State (the only and true incarnation of Revolution – sowe are told) or Apocalypse.

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It is important to note that for Bosteels these are tasks, more than predic-tions or descriptions of what is happening in Bolivia. Even as he is thinkingthrough these theoretical tasks in very close interaction with the work ofGarcıa Linera and the Bolivian context, the entire development presents away of thinking about the current historical unfolding without which, as hehimself argues, it would just seem like a return of the undead. He is whollyaware of the possible pitfalls of the process as well as of the predictability ofpronouncements coming from figures of states and does not want to resortto turning Garcıa Linera into a prophet. Nevertheless, it is odd that giventhis emphasis on deviations it goes unremarked that with the possibility ofthe state declaring itself a revolutionary state a ‘deviation’ has been alreadyrisked (and perhaps more than just risked). For the unexpected upshot ofthis application of the theory of deviations, which in important ways isrelated to Alain Badiou’s work, is that it can itself be branded as a variant ofspeculative leftism.

The declaration that the state can be an event, and one that would come tocompensate for the limitations of, while gathering its momentum from, the‘real movement of society’, concerns not just the structural places of formlessmasses and formalising states, but the stratification of these terms. The form-less is the event that the formalising state declares without end while separ-ating from it. In Badiou’s terms, this is the hallmark of the negative will ofspeculative leftism:

Speculative leftism imagines that intervention authorizes itself on thebasis of itself alone; that it breaks from the situation without any othersupport than its own negative will . . . The violence of this falsethought is anchored in its representation of an imaginary Twowhose temporal manifestation is signed . . . by the ultra-one of theevent, Revolution or Apocalypse. (Badiou 2005: 210)

Badiou adds: ‘the real consequences of an event, being submitted to structure,cannot be discerned as such’ (2005: 211). I leave aside any possible critique thatcan be made as to how Badiou himself proceeds from here in order to avoidthe temptation of the ultra-One and simply remark that it is in the temporalplane that the pitfalls of this drive to calculate the whole of politics becomefully exposed.

Revolution and the formless, an other politics

In a process in which the plurinational state is posited as the return of whathad never left, the formless is what always returns but should have alwaysalready been gone. This is not the constitutive outside of hegemony, whichhere is reimagined as a closed circle without gaps. Yet, the reverse side ofthese moments, as Garcıa Linera himself puts it in his texts on the social move-ments, reveals the fiction of legitimacy that partitioned social space andordered exclusions and inclusions. However, to call this mobilizationanarchy is to have already adopted the point of view and position of thestate and its order. For the mobilizations in question are nothing if not symp-toms of order; they are fundamentally turned toward the violence of order.

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Perhaps, then, it is order that has people in constant mobilization, not anarchy(of which we know very little).

In Garcıa Linera’s own reading of Marx’s Capital, we find a very dense butilluminating elaboration of this dynamic, precisely in the chapter on theNation (Ch. 5). In a scene in which individuals can relate to other individualsonly by way of things, the independent commodities that embody their socialrelations relate to one another through the value form. Now, the value form isitself a moment in which capitalist universality exists as fragmentation andseparation. Garcıa Linera then comments:

This essential movement of the value form is, therefore, what allowsand in fact requires that social subspaces still delimitated in a form-less manner by the density of use value with a universal character. . . necessarily take on an interior consistency and a ‘relative auton-omy’ so as to be able to be reflected in the body of value of others. . . Fragmentary social subspaces, in so far as they are the socialpotentiality of what happens on the simple level of two bearers ofcommodities, constitute an inescapable condition of the socialempire of the value form. (Garcıa Linera 2009: 224)

The fiction of order, the background against which social mobilisations erupt,is this fragmented empire of the value form, in which the amorphous, thosezones defined by the density of use value, is of necessity made to take on aninterior consistency. This passage is significant for in it is revealed the samekind of opposition between the amorphous ‘use value’ zone and the coerciveforce that makes the formless take on consistency. In moving onto the trans-formation of this dynamic or to the possibility of a post-capitalist community,Garcıa Linera envisions nothing different happening at this level: ‘The ancientnon capitalist national form . . . is equally required to make its forces cohere . . .when it faces the (real or formal) external force of disaggregation’, and heconcludes:

The ancestral in the use value, as a direct component of the socialform of the product of labour, comes to be tied to the new universalcharacter of the use value, which yields a synthesis that supersedesall that exists: the social-universal community, which we will callthe universalized Ayllu. (Garcıa Linera 2009: 228–29)

The vocabulary here is that of the dialectic, which serves here and elsewhere totransform what appears to be an obstacle into an asset. The operation at issueis of great importance in understanding the specificity of Garcıa Linera’s inter-vention within his national context.

Garcıa Linera, the dialectician, takes lo abigarrado (which appeared as theobstacle for both previous generations of intellectuals, such as Zavaleta, andthe modernising state alike), and turns it into the very essence of his recastingof the nation as plurinational state. He then takes the kernel of that sublationand puts it in the exact same place in which ‘the people’ were held within theideological circle of the Nationalist Revolutionary episteme, namely, the placewhere the synthesis of all that exists takes place. The revolution, this specific

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kind of revolution, runs parallel to the analysis of Bolivia as a country that isnot modern, such as we can find it in Zavaleta’s thought. Liberal democracyworks for countries that have gone through the process of modern individua-tion, and in which the ‘normative fidelities and the traditional regiments ofaggregation (family [etc.]) have been eroded’ (Garcıa Linera 2008: 261).Bolivia is a different case. Economically, what obtains in Bolivia is so hetero-geneous that it can be considered modern or industrial only minimally(Garcıa Linera 2008: 261). It is a question of facing up to the temporality ofBolivia, which is decidedly, for Garcıa Linera, not modern.

It is worth noting the temporal dimension of this argument. UltimatelyGarcıa Linera’s conjunctural proposal rests on the revolutionary potentialfor unleashing the full force of the Bolivian state as an agent of growthand development. And it is here that time comes back into the picture:‘[t]o the extent that the different forms of production and of the organiz-ation of politics belong to different civilizational regimes, their rhythmsand historical times are heterogeneous, which makes it necessary to thinkin punctual synchronicity, in short periods’ (Garcıa Linera 2008: 263). Theexample he offers is the practice of electing officials in Chapare andPotosi. Here Garcıa Linera finds a momentary punctual synchronicity inthe simultaneous use of a liberal/modern individual vote and traditional/communal deliberation. To what extent the constitution of the plurinationalstate has resulted in the materialization of such an institution is still amatter of debate. However, what is already clear is that, as Javier Sanjinesnoted recently,

we have returned . . . to state capitalism – and . . . the production of anew horizon of communal self-rule is further off each day. The currentlimitations on the ‘multitude form’ . . . shows the uncertain directionof indigenous campesino nationalities that call upon their customs andtraditions to defend themselves from the very same PlurinationalState that, as it grows more invasive and authoritarian, contravenesthe norms set by its own Constitution and by international treatiesto which Bolivia is a signatory. (Sanjines 2013: 167)

Exposing the contemporaneousness of the non-contemporary, we now know,yields a difference, but one that is still intricately tied to the state’s hegemonyre-imagined or rehabilitated as the real community of all. It is the specific con-ception of the present, or of time as present actuality that is at the root of thisresult, and for this very same reason a more radical appeal to the multitudeform would not make a difference.

To interrupt or dismantle the mode of capitalist ‘civilizational domina-tion’ is not something that can be simply decided:

‘[t]he question of . . . the possibility of a communitarian society is notone of bookish logic, but of historical logic. One does not go beyondcapitalism . . . by way of a theoretical deduction following a concep-tual scheme, but by following “the real movement that unfolds beforeour eyes”.’ (Garcıa Linera 2008: 258 n. 323)

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Garcıa Linera sees the plurinational state not as a theoretical construction, butas an intervention in a political conjuncture, which takes its point of departurefrom the correlation of real and potential forces. But in addition, this point ofdeparture is in itself a tacit formalization of time – of the present, to be moreprecise. The hope, he concludes, is to ‘combine’ modern and traditional insti-tutions. The temporal asynchrony at the heart of the plurinational state is theinteriorisation and sublation of an obstacle that, in becoming the content of thestate form, creates the conditions for Bolivia to become contemporaneous withitself. The state will be the ontological synthesis of Bolivia, its true image. Onone level, the temporality that is thus formalized is not modern, if by modernwe understand a capitalist homogenizing and single empty time, which GarcıaLinera exposes as being itself the articulation of fragmentary moments. Thusthe incorporation of the formless into the form of the state is but the reverseof the ideological image of itself that Eurocentric modernity has tried invain to impose on the world. On a different level, however, this coevalnesswould be a clarified image of modernity, where modern now means the effi-cient management of all the different temporalities that accrue in a singularpoint. In both cases, what is at issue is the becoming contemporaneous withitself of Bolivia – Bolivia facing up to its true identity. Not only does thisnot make it possible to delve into the historical conflicts that are coded intothese various temporalities, it exacerbates them by projecting modernity,pluri-temporal and plurinational as it may be, as the telos of the community.Anything that does not move in line with this tendency is then excludedfrom its present as so many (catastrophic) deviations from the correct courseof fully calculated politics.

Once this modernizing scheme is put in place as the horizon of thepresent, and the present as the opening toward the communal, everythingthat is deemed traditional is itself changed, sundered from itself. Just as thestate interiorizes the asynchrony of the pluri-national, so too must commu-nities become divided from the inside in order to make way for the violenceinscribed in their becoming part of the hegemonic makeup of the state. Anecessary shift in the lines demarcating alliances and disputes begins to takeshape. In the process, the community form becomes exposed as an idealistor utopian projection, which serves as the imagined answer to the problemof the value form of capitalism. The value form, or, more simply, the logicsof capital, can only ever do one thing to the community form: fragment anddistort it. That is what capitalism does in the process of real subsumption.Relations between people become relations between objects. To imagine thatit is possible to have it any other way is sheer voluntarism.

Where deviations are detected, calculability had already been assumed asthe standard bearer of the political. Perhaps it is the case that calculation ismerely a precondition of politics; yet it is in the name of the non-calculablethat Garcıa Linera had earlier amended the Althusserian distinctionbetween theory and ideology. Marxism, Qhananchiri had pointed out, is notsomething that can be purified: it is always already hounded through all itsinterstices by its doubts and problems, by impulses and interests that not somuch seek to derail (as this very idea implies the existence of a properpath), but instead make it impossible to calculate and determine the properas such. The impossibility of calculating the proper sense and character of

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Marxism is what exposes any meditation on the derailment of the revolution,by ideological or theoretical deviations, not to a further, or more essential,derailment, but to its collapse. In this sense, its derailment is, in fact, a fallinto the dogmatic position that holds that somehow one actor speaks for thewhole and safeguards the access to the political in every case. What keepsescaping from Marxist theory and practice, then, concerns not some failureon the ground, but its own inability to come to terms with its desire to dom-inate and discipline time, which is forever escaping it. This does not meanthat Marxism should look for a more refined theoretical tool with which tocapture it. The challenge would be how to think through the unapprehensibil-ity of the non-temporal, or the non-subjective formless mass that leaves ‘poli-tics’ beyond the possibility of non-deviational calculability. Needless to say,this challenge is a challenge to the very idea of politics at the heart of Marxism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Vega, O. 2013. ‘Tiempo en movimiento: El retorno de la Bolivia plebeya’. Paper pre-sented at the ‘Democracy in the Andes: The Work of Alvaro Garcıa Linera’ Conference, Uni-versity of Texas A&M, November 14–16.

Jaime Rodrıguez Matos is Assistant Professor of Spanish at The University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor. His book The Writing of the Formless: Religion, Revolutionand the End of Times, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

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