Iñigo Errejón Galván
ierrejon@cps.ucm.es
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Jesús Espasandín López
chusespasandin@yahoo.es
Universidad Complutense, España
Pablo Iglesias Turrión
pi211@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract:
The electoral victory in 2005 of the Socialist Movement headed by Eva Morales had a worldwide significance. In this article, we will hold that the political events in Bolivia over recent years have to be interpreted as more than a mere change in the country’s political elite. What is happening in Bolivia is, in our judgment, the institutional crystallization of a set of processes that converged with the start of a cycle of anti-neo-liberal fights that initiated in the year 2000. The origins and effects of that “rebel cycle” transcend the country scale, even though it represents its most visible space of materialization. In first place, using the perspective of Wallerstein’s world-system, we present an explanation of the historical tendencies of transformation of geopolitical power distribution and the integration dynamics of capitalism. We pay special attention to the effects of systemic reordering of neo-liberal globalization since the 1970s. In second place, we examine the effects of neo-liberalism on the geopolitical situation of Bolivia and its determining influence on the emergence of indigenous political identities, as well as the crisis of political protagonism of the Bolivian miner proletarians, within the framework of impugnation processes of coloniality. In third place, we analyze some aspects of the influence of these elements (global systemic dynamics and transformation of class structures) on the constitutional process currently open in Bolivia. We describe the interactions between the political actors that intervene in the constitutional process, paying special attention to the role of social movements.
Keywords: Analysis of world-systems, systemic opportuntity structures, indianism, social movements, constitutional power.
