ABSTRACT
This chapter traces relations between the creole oligarchy and peasant/indigenous subalterns from the colonial period through to the development of capitalist relations of production under the national-popular revolution of 1952. It then explores this relation under neoliberalism and how, under the ‘pink tide’ regime of Evo Morales, Bolivia has sought to revisit national developmentalism by means of neo-extractivism. Morales deployed a populism that favoured neo-extractive activity by national, sub-imperial, and imperial capital to fund the ‘compensatory state’, underpinning welfare measures for the urban precariat and supporting small-scale commercial farmers through reformism, while largely neglecting the counter-hegemonic aims, and reproductive crisis, of the middle/lower peasantry and lowland indigenous groups. The erosion of the livelihoods of these groups by extractive capital is generating intensified political unrest.
