The elusive revolution
Did the MAS storm Bolivia’s winter palace? Review: Visions of Transformation: Hegemony, Plurinationality, and Revolution in Bolivia, Aaron Augsburger, by Gavin O'Toole
Visions of Transformation: Hegemony, Plurinationality, and Revolution in Bolivia, Aaron Augsburger, 2025, University of Arizona Press
When is a revolution not a revolution? Valuable raw material for answering this question, which has exercised minds for centuries, can be mined in Bolivia.
Observers of the poor South American country have debated what makes a revolution exhaustively since the “proceso de cambio” began in the early 2000s after a disastrous neoliberal interregnum.
The Argentine-Mexican Marxist historian Adolfo Gilly labelled this the “first revolution of the 21st century”, and it is intimately associated with the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and its leader Evo Morales.
Morales was swept to power in 2006 following an extraordinary series of events that rocked the country: the “Water War” in Cochabamba in 2000, mobilisations by the Aymara in the altiplano from 2000-02, protests by the cocaleros in Chapare from 2000-03, and the “Gas Wars” of 2003 and 2005.
Bolivia was, almost literally, turned upside down by popular protests, strikes, highway blockades, and violent confrontations between workers and the state.
Its first indigenous president, who served from 2006 to 2019 and was accused of just about everything by his conservative opponents and their predictable cheerleader, Washington, Morales was removed from power in a de facto coup following disputed elections.
Nonetheless, Bolivia’s experience had, indeed, been momentous—MAS governments oversaw the longest period of economic growth and political stability in the country’s history yielding huge gains in social welfare, expanded political rights, and legislative and cultural changes to tackle racism, discrimination and exclusion.
A key moment that captured world attention was the 2009 constitution that established Bolivia as a “plurinational” state—an assertion of its indigenous diversity and the existence of multiple political communities.
But was what happened during all the tumult a revolution? And did it then collapse under the inherent strains of a political economy based on extractive industries?
Theoretical positions grounded in social scientific perspectives inherited from the 18th century have offered several models of what really constitutes revolutionary change—but, like a revolution itself, these remain contested.
Nonetheless, it’s an important question because considerable attention has been devoted to assessing whether the so-called “Pink Tide” of leftwing change across much of Latin America following democratisation led to fundamental social transformations. Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela were often considered to be more radical or “revolutionary” Pink Tide examples.
Accordingly, theories to account for what occurred during Bolivia’s proceso de cambio within the larger historical study of revolutionary transformation take several analytic approaches.
These assert, first, that a revolution indeed took place during the 2000-05 upheavals—although Morales and the MAS were its products not its progenitors.
A second position suggests that the conditions for a revolutionary rupture were present but the Morales government subsequently appropriated, and ultimately defused, these.
A third view accepts that while there might have been a revolutionary situation, a radical transformation was prevented by structural constraints—not least the extractivist economy.
A fourth approach stresses the multiple and often conflicting ideological currents that make up the MAS and how these fragmented the revolutionary process. In the absence of a shared vision, the state bureaucracy directed change, ultimately limiting what was possible.
Aaron Augsburger has adopted a novel methodology, addressing revolution from the perspective of two competing visions cherished in Bolivia in this period, by making a distinction between the theory of hegemony and that of plurinationality.
He uses examples of several developments under Morales to consider what these two notions of social change mean for the social scientific category of revolution.
His argument is that their worldviews advance contrasting ideas of power, organisation, identity and governance and this divergence explains the contradictions of the proceso de cambio.
At the heart of this divergence is the nation-state, to which the theory of hegemony is inherently linked—a territorial form of political authority, economic organisation, and identity formation.
As conceptualised by Antonio Gramsci, the notion of hegemony highlights the ability of a dominant group to maintain economic and cultural-ideological control over subordinate classes, and it is the sociopolitical terrain of the nation-state in which it is consolidated.
Hegemony is an important Marxian concept to consider in the case of Bolivia because, within the country and especially during the Morales period, Gramsci has been a particularly influential source of critical thinking.
René Zavaleta Mercado, one of Bolivia’s most important twentieth-century thinkers, adopted a highly original form of critical Marxism whose theoretical model for understanding Bolivia’s “motley” society appears to have been based on Gramscian ideas.
Zavaleta Mercado was, in turn, a key influence on Álvaro García Linera, the former MAS vice president considered its foremost intellectual strategist, who put the Gramscian stamp of hegemony firmly upon the movement’s ideology.
Augsburger writes: “The theory of hegemony and its attendant ontological view of politics … guided the MAS on its rise to power and shaped its governing practice … As one of the contending theories of revolutionary change in 21st-century Bolivia, hegemony has provided the ideological foundations on which the MAS sought to radically reform the country from a position of political, economic, social, and cultural domination. In other words, through this theoretical perspective, the MAS as the hegemonic subject represented the universal will of all oppressed Bolivians in their struggle for emancipation.”
The demand for plurinationality in Bolivia emanates from the country’s indigenous peoples, and suggests a different form of political authority, economic organisation, and identity—as yet ill-defined, but nonetheless radically different to the nation-state.
Plurinationality implies the existence of different cultures with all their concomitant cosmological implications within the political sphere and envisages a mode of social coexistence in which conflicts are managed in a non-coercive way.
Above all, the emphasis upon plurinationality challenges the core space in which hegemonic perspectives operate—the totality of the nation-state and its dominant mode of political activity.
The contrasting logics of hegemony and plurinationality are highly relevant to an understanding of what happened in Bolivia, Augsburger argues, because they can provide an interpretative framework for understanding the 2019 coup.
He suggests that this crisis arose from a complex array of factors all linked to the struggle for hegemony as the guiding logic of the MAS: its alliance with old elite classes and fractions of capital; the continuation of the existing mode of accumulation; its failure to transform the state’s institutional apparatus in order to entrench the revolutionary process; its hostility to the idea of indigenous autonomy; and its continued reliance on an extractivist mode of accumulation.
The author examines three key examples during this period when the tensions between hegemonic and plurinational visions surfaced: indigenous resistance to construction of a highway through the TIPNIS forest reserve; the power struggle within the CONAMAQ indigenous movement over support for the MAS; and the contradictions inherent in state efforts to shape the institutional structure of indigenous autonomy after 2009.
Augsburger uses these cases as examples of the tensions that can explain the 2019 crisis and how Morales and the MAS were overthrown seemingly with such ease.
There is no doubt the failure of the MAS to institutionally reconstruct Bolivia’s state on plurinational terms was a grave mistake—the state, after all, is absolutely central to Marx’s conception of social relations and much subsequent Marxian debate.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that key MAS thinkers such as García Linera were captivated by state power as central to revolution.
However, the Irish Marxist John Holloway—whose work is closely associated with the Zapatistas in Mexico—is among those who think otherwise, arguing that the fetishisation of state power threatens to impede the prospect of real revolutionary transformation.
This seems to emerge as the reflexive position of the author, and Augsburger points to the system of ayllus in Bolivia in which originate the tendency and capacity to maintain social heterogeneity through a segmented political structure that is the basis of plurinationality.
Nonetheless, regardless of the prospect or not that the state will wither away, it is likely that historians will never resolve whether the Bolivian socialist movement failed to build a true revolution or undermined one that had already occurred.
Notwithstanding this, Augsburger makes a valuable contribution to this debate by showing how the combinations and conflicts of contrasting theoretical approaches during the Morales years can offer a new source of analysis in the conceptualisation of revolution—and new sources of guidance for those who cherish it.
He writes: “It may in fact be the case that, given current conditions, a real form of plurinationality is unattainable, that it is a radical utopia too easily co-opted discursively from various political positions for contrasting purposes, as well as impossible on a concrete, practical level in a world dominated by the nation-state form and global capitalism.
“If that is the case, then perhaps the revolutionary politics of hegemony is the politics of what is possible.
“Nevertheless, this is not what many Bolivians have accepted, and in struggling for plurinationality they have struggled to bring new worlds into being. In the process they have advanced new visions of transformation while also exposing the imperatives and constraints of the old ones.”
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