Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, Andrea Marston, 2024, Duke University Press
Latin America is important to the study of nationalism not least because the independence revolutions of the early 19th century inaugurated an era in which early forms of this ideology began to emerge before its subsequent, disastrous manifestations in Europe.
Yet nationalism, although an anachronism in some ways, also remains important to understanding the contemporary conflicts that divide Latin America, because nation-building retains relevance in societies still riven by the ethno-racial legacies of colonialism.
As Andrea Martson suggests, in countries like Bolivia disputes about the national idea and ethno-racial nation-building concepts such as mestizaje continue to lurk in the background of contemporary political issues.
In this respect, Bolivia shares much with Mexico where nation-building assumed a formal position in the ideological canon after the Revolution as the official, “revolutionary nationalism” of the single party, the PRI, that would rule the country for more than 70 years.
In Mexico, the revolutionary era explicitly vested as an obligation on the ascendant state the intent, hitherto disputed largely by competing elites, to give form to the nation, and it did so through the radical 1917 constitution.
This established obligations on the new state to guide social development and integrate society: its Article 27 established a concept of the nation and a programme for its formation.
In particular, it confirmed that it was the “nation” that owned natural resources, specified as Mexican all titles to land and water, and mandated the expropriation of large estates—thereby giving the state unique power to determine property forms.
The similarities between Bolivia’s 1952 revolution and that of Mexico have long been studied, and the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) was not unlike the PRI, establishing state control over natural resources and the economy.
In both cases, a state-defined nationalism was to the fore, and subsequent political divisions were always in essence a reflection of different visions of the nation.
In Mexico, for example, when the technocratic leaders of the PRI began to dismantle the state’s control over resources as part of neoliberal reform in the late 1980s, they did so explicitly in the language of nationalism.
In a similar vein, Marston suggests that the tensions between the “new left”, epitomised more recently by Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the old left, reflect a tension between competing visions of nationalism.
What is distinctive in the Bolivian case is that nationalism is closely associated with the subterranean world—the patrimonio found in the subsoil, where the main subject of Marston’s study, cooperative miners, toil away unseen and until recently, largely unheard.
The author argues that in Bolivia the subterranean has been the bedrock of successive iterations of nationhood, and the Morales era was one in which this idea was in contention, an example of which was the pioneering declaration of Bolivia as a “plurinational” state.
Questions of both nation and subterranean nature were central topics of debate throughout the Morales period because his ability to implement the social programmes he promised and that Bolivia needed—universal healthcare, rural electrification, and social grants—depended on the rents the state gained from natural resources, that is, national patrimony.
As this coincided with a commodities boom in which the prices for raw materials were high, it inaugurated a period of “neo-extractivism”, which became critical to Morales’ initial successes but over time began to alienate traditional supporters, conflicts that would ultimately presage his downfall.
The goal of Subterranean Matters is to rethink contemporary senses of nationalism in relation to the matters and meanings of the subterranean in Bolivia. Marston considers the changing dynamics of nationalist ideas according to a novel, materialist vertical axis reaching from above ground deep into the country’s geology.
Her principal subjects are mining cooperatives, which occupy a contradictory position in Bolivian politics. They exist at the juncture between their support for the leftwing project of Morales and his pursuit of a “plurinational” state, yet are nonetheless seen by many Bolivians in a bad light for ransacking national patrimony below ground.
A great merit of this book, however, is that it engages with a topic critically important to the study of contemporary nationalism in Latin America—neoliberalism.
What distinguishes the Latin American new left in the period denoted the “pink tide” in which left-of-centre government came to power is that it had to navigate a region that had already been fundamentally restructured by neoliberal reforms.
As Marston observes, the rise of artisanal mining after 1985 was specifically related to a suite of neoliberal policies when the country’s nationalised tin mines were closed. She writes: “Suddenly bereft of employers, cooperative miners seemed to embody the neoliberal ethos”.
This is a welcome direction in the approach to nationalism because the nation represents a problem for liberalism in all its forms, and that problematic reflects dilemmas in liberal thought concerning the ways in which market freedom conflicts with the idea of national economy; and concerning the difficulties of reconciling individual liberty with the social or communitarian rights implied by nationalism.
Two principal ideas have shaped Latin American political thought—liberalism and nationalism, yet there are nonetheless very few studies about the relationship between these.
The great historian Eric Hobsbawm undertook one of the few Marxist analyses to examine nationalism in relation to liberalism and drew attention to problems that classical political economy had with the national idea—nonetheless, his focus was not Latin America.
Marston takes a step in this direction. She shows that Bolivia under Morales represents a valuable case study of the tensions between these formative ideologies and how, in the case of national patrimony, the new left ultimately struggled to reconcile them.
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Categories: Bolivia, South America