Landed-Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation

Geopolitics of the Amazon

Álvaro García Linera

14/01/2013

Opinión

^-A ⁺A

The whole course of the ... revolution ... strikingly confirmed one of Marx’s profound propositions: revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counter-revolution, i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defence and in this way devises ever more powerful means of attack. —V.I. Lenin

I want to welcome the initiative taken by Ana Esther Ceceña, and all the comrades who have commented on her article,1 in opening the debate around the present political situation in Bolivia. The thoughts of each of the participants not only demonstrate the interest in the events and greater or lesser revolutionary engagement with them, but also help to shed light on the complexity of the political processes and possible ways to advance them.

Revolution and counterrevolution

It was Lenin who pointed out that any real revolutionary process will generate an even greater counterrevolution. This means that any revolution must advance in order to consolidate itself, but in doing so it arouses forces opposed to its advance that block the revolution, which in turn, in order to defend and consolidate itself, will have to advance further, arousing even greater reactions from the conservative forces, and so on indefinitely. In Bolivia, in the last 12 years, we have experienced an ascending revolutionary process which, emerging from organized civil society as a social movement, has affected and traversed the state structure itself, modifying the very nature of civil society.

This is a revolution that is political, cultural and economic. Political, because it has revolutionized the social nature of the state, having enshrined the rights of the indigenous peoples and given concrete expression to those rights through the actual occupation of the state administration by the indigenous peoples. We are talking about an act of social sovereignty that has made possible the conversion of the indigenous demographic majority into a state political majority; a modification of the social and class nature of control and hegemony in the state. This is in fact the most important and significant transformation in the country since its birth, a country characterized until very recently by the exclusion of the indigenous citizenry from absolutely all of the decision-making structures of the state. But it is also a radical political and cultural revolution, because this indigenous imprint on public decision- making as a state power has been the work of social movements and organizational methods derived from the trade-union, communal and plebeian nature of the indigenous- popular world. That is, the presence of the indigenous- popular world in the conduct of the state since 2006 has been concretely expressed not as a mere individual

Contents

Revolution and counterrevolution

The Amazon and hereditary despotic power

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS)

Plurinational State and dismantling of the business-hereditary power

The historic demand for construction of a road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains

IIRSA: The farce of empty chatter

Characteristics of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway

Colonialist fallacies

Who has the power in the Amazon?

Once again on so-called “extractivism”