José Luis Laguna
“To make philosophy to hammering,” Nietzsche proposed, for the urgent need to knock down mud idles that were venerated in modern thinking. That need becomes pressing when superficial pragmatism has camouflaged Jacobins and formal drills to the erratic work of politics, to unmask and disrupt these despotic and arbitrary narratives.
First. The officials of official thought have instrumentalized and resignified the notions of origin, these being used as artifacts to impose hegemonic rhetoric and legitimize refutable beliefs in the social imaginary. The most recent and gross attempt was to convert the indigenous into synonym for environmental ethics and harmony, reducing the preexistence of these peoples to a naturalistic essentialism that omits qualitative persistence in the historical constitutive of Bolivian society, despite the serious unresolved and contradictory tensions that the policy itself has not been able to resolve until today.
The official story of the last 40 years forged a meaning of the indigenous being endowed with a legitimacy immanent to its condition of aboriginal, an innate carrier of an immaculate collective and community morality, which is fallacious because, like all, the indigenous people have been part of society, despite the structural disadvantages with which they have had to deal with being full citizens. This anthropological fiction further weakened the already weak social and political constitution of the Bolivian nation, because it deepened historical differences and grudges. The indigenous was an instrument of political transaction that gave rise to artificial legal mechanisms of positive and highly politicized and corrupt positive discrimination, avoiding the substantive recognition of the diverse and complex history of much of the Bolivian nationality, indispensable for consolidation any contemporary statement project.
As Edward Said warned, essentialism is a new form of domination, which converts identities into functional instruments for the rise of authoritarian powers, read: fascisms, nationalisms or populisms.
Cultural alienation does not disappear with the fictitious or formal recognition of the “originality” of a social group, because that recognition will end up creating first and second citizenships, as Trump applies today between white society in front of the other strangers. The indigenous, like any identity, is historical, dialectical and likely to be manipulated and stripped of its emancipatory sense.
Claiming the unscrutinical cultural diversity of apparent rhetoric, is to make it fetish, mere symbol; On the contrary, claiming the indigenous from an integrative perspective and on an inclusive social project based on citizen education and the critical and collective review of history, is to affirm its definitive emancipatory power.
Second. The ritualities that appear to be ancestral, reaffirmators of cultural origin and faith, are generally becoming parodies that mask social stratification systems, power and submission relations. Traditions reinvent and commercialize to consolidate the economic and cultural supremacy of the most powerful, surprising the naive people who dance alienated in their beliefs. Under an increasingly plastic, apparent and more apparent aesthetic that breaks with the vernacular aesthetics of native cultures. The popular festival imports the polyethylene colors of China and dazzles the people with supercherías tornaded in “culture.”
Clifford Geetz pointed out that rituals are complex systems of symbols that express beliefs, values and worldviews, are spaces for reunion, negotiation of prestige and gifts. Therefore, the apparent “payment” and the eternal return to the Pachamama or the miraculous deities, operate as mercantile and clientele devices administered by new owners of capital. These rituals no longer connect with the deep sense, nor work as revelation of the oppressed; They are used as scripts loaded with superstitious and magical content to alienate the people.
We live in a spectacle society says Guy Debord. In this show the discipline power with symbols without needing punishments, complementary Focault. Under this logic, in popular rituals control control, distraction and submission strategies. Social alienation, disguised as tradition and is sacralized as a culture.
III. The moral economy of the new “political subject and” living well “were reduced to functional neologism to the dominant narrative,” living well “and” indigenous peasant “, condense the contradictions and banalities of a novel apparent model that never managed to become a real alternative to the Bolivian commercial capitalist system.
The constitutionalized political subject was created to amalgamate deeply dissimilar stories and realities, artificially unified by political agreements to make the “revolutionary social block” proclaimed by Gramsci and Bolivian neonationalists viable. This assembly sought to make a new political ruling to provide social and cultural content to the “plurinational state”, without mediating an effective transformation of the historical subject that was intended to claim. This category lacks an organic social foundation, and even less has managed to constitute alternative economic subjects to liberal individualism. Although Álvaro García Linera, he coveted that they embody a “double identity”, original and Bolivian. But what he succeeded is that this fictitious amalgam expresses deep unresolved contradictions such as social marginality, economic informality and cultural precariousness, chronic conditions of much of Bolivian society.
In practice, those who carry this label, do so in a regional, socially and economically disintegrated: some originals, other peasants and others simply indigenous. Although they are presented as essential actors of “living well”, they operate under logics of private property, family accumulation and generational reproduction, like any contemporary subject based on their contextual possibilities. In some cases, obliged, to accept the community property regime, in which the commercial and capitalist sense is subsumed. Therefore, “living well” never became an economic alternative to capitalism; On the contrary, many forms of the peasant and indigenous moral economy work within the commercial circuit, complement it and even subordinate to the logic of capital.
