Revolutionary Extractivism in Bolivia? · Global Voices
A march by <PERSON> (<PERSON> / Creative Commons)
This article by <PERSON> and <PERSON> was originally published on NACLA's website.
Across Latin America, the boom in oil, gas, and mineral extraction and export—extractivism—has intensified debate about the trade-off between social redistribution and socio-environmental impacts. In neoliberal countries where violent dispossession is intensified, extractivism is easier to critique. Yet in Bolivia, where recently re-elected President <PERSON> speaks of deepening a socialist project through what we might call ‘social’ extractivism, the ecological left is often at odds. Social extractivism uses money (rents) from natural gas and mineral exports to improve public infrastructures and alleviate poverty through redistributive policies. This positions the state in a key economic role and reverses, in some ways, two decades of free-market neoliberalism. If a lower poverty rate and 61% of the country voting for <PERSON> is any indication, extractivism with a redistributive side has broad popular support.
So what is to critique? Critics have argued that extractivism, even with ‘social’ redistribution, destroys nature, deepens authoritarian politics, and furthers dependence on global capitalist markets. Critics charge that the apparent boom in the present masks the absence of a real economic vision for the future. In the name of Mother Earth, it follows, extractivism contributes to inalterable ecosystemic ruptures such as global warming. In contrast, those defending social extractivism argue that it is merely an instrument of economic transformation, necessary to address poverty in the present and lay the foundations for a new economy and society in the future. Compared to neoliberal regimes, it follows, Bolivia (and Ecuador) are socially and environmentally progressive, with the state using gas and mineral rents to promote economic diversification through industrialization, new local economies, and education for a post-extractive technology economy. Despite ongoing dependence on global capital, it is argued, this is the path toward twenty-first century socialism.
The debate has tended to stagnate around this well trodden back-and-forth, but we seek to further the conversation by returning our attention to social movement struggles—key spaces through which creative transformation emerges. Acknowledging the revolutionary opening created by the MAS, we consider the complicated new terrain of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic inequities under MAS and “progressive extractivism,” question uneven land redistribution and access to resources in rural economies, and explore extractivism’s impact on the national labor scenario. Lastly, we conclude by considering the dilemma of North-South engagement and solidarity.
After revolution, patriarchy?
The MAS government has opened space for women even as the <PERSON> administration has been criticized for reproducing patriarchal politics. 289
<PERSON> himself sometimes slips into the machista mode of speech – joking, for instance, about conquering opponents by seducing ‘their’ women. Yet the paradoxes of gender and sexuality in the context of extractivism go beyond ways of speaking or the formal inclusion of women. Certainly on the social and redistributive side, the widespread installation of natural gas lines in urban homes eases the domestic labor of women. Cash transfers for infant and maternal health, support of the elderly, and grants to schoolchildren have all contributed to women’s well-being.
Yet, in structural terms, extractive economies exacerbate gendered inequalities. Extractive regimes, compared to manufacturing and other economic activities, produce relatively few jobs. Most are semi- and high-skilled jobs that generally go to men. This repositions women as dependent on male earnings, much like the cash transfers reach women as mothers and wives. And as redistribution, transfers are significant but small compared to expenditures on the military, universities, regional governments, and municipal governments. As these more significant expenditures invariably move through masculine circuits of rent circulation the machista world of back-room, alcohol fueled patronage politics – men talking about conquering other men by way of their women – comes full circle. Thus, even after neoliberalism, natural gas fuels an economic structure and a patriarchal politics that work against gender equity.
Government policy can exert a counterweight to these structural forces, if there is a real commitment to ‘depatriarchalization’. And, to be sure, coinciding with the structural effects of extractivism, an ideological struggle continues around the politics of liberatory sexuality. Consider the recent abortion debate sparked by a court challenge from <PERSON>, a MAS legislator. Reading the new constitution’s passage on women’s sexual freedom, <PERSON> sued for the decriminalization of abortion. Two years of public debate followed, pitting this liberatory challenge against an alliance of evangelicals, the Catholic Church, right-wing parties, and self-proclaimed male revolutionaries of the MAS. 339