ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tensions and divergences between two subaltern political projects advanced in Bolivia in the last decades, and their respective visions of territory and extractivism: the “state-campesino” project, put forward primarily by the main rural worker unions, out of which Evo Morales’s Movement to Socialism (MAS) party emerged; and the “communitarian-Indigenous” project, articulated by Indigenous organisations as well as dissident campesino communities. We argue that, while the MAS’s state-campesino project centres on the defence of national sovereignty, and aims to regulate while promoting extractivism, Indigenous-communitarian organisations’ struggles focus on reasserting territorial sovereignty and plurinationality. We show that, although some Indigenous-communitarian organisations also relate pragmatically with extractive projects, their political horizon fundamentally transcends the predatory and colonial logic of extractivist development, and strives for the preservation or reconstitution of communitarian modes of (re)production. We maintain that entrenched extractivism and sustained political dispossession have resulted in Indigenous-communitarian organisations being strongly opposed to the MAS, which contributed to the complex political conflict surrounding the October 2019 national elections.
