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DOI: 10.1177/0896920510365208

2010 36: 437Crit SociolJames Petras and Henry Veltmeyer

A Class Perspective on Social Ecology and the Indigenous Movement

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A Class Perspective on Social Ecologyand the Indigenous Movement

James PetrasIDS, Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia, Canada

Henry VeltmeyerSaint Marys University, Nova Scotia, Canada

Abstract

This article argues the need to turn back from a postmodernist pivot in social analysis to Marxism

in theory and class analysis. We argue this point in regard to two contemporary issues of critical

sociology: the dynamics of a growing worldwide ecological crisis and the current dynamics of the

indigenous movement in Latin America. Both areas of sociological analysis have been seriously

affected by the retreat from Marxism and in need of class analysis.

Keywords

class analysis, indigenous movements, liberalism, Marxism, social ecology

Introduction

Like international development studies, sociology in the mid-1980s underwent and suf-fered what Booth (1985) and others (e.g. Schuurman 1993) described as a theoreticalimpasse. There has been surprisingly little theoretical reflection and analysis of whatspecifically was behind and led to this impasse but it was evidently about a generalizedcritique of structuralism, structuralist forms of analysis and associated ideologies andmeta-theoretical narratives (Agrawal 2005; Lyotard 1987; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005b).One of the chief victims of this poststructuralist critique, which might well be viewed asthe latest outbreak in a long series of attacks by philosophical idealists against all formsof social scientific, that is, structuralist and materialist, forms of analysis (GulbenkianCommission 1996), was Marxism. In Latin America, for example, this poststructuralistcritique, which was indeed leveled against both sociological positivism (liberalism) and his-torical materialism (Marxism) still the two dominant forms of social science led to

Critical Sociology36(3) 437-452

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438 Critical Sociology36(3)

a widespread abandonment of Marxist class analysis in what Best and Kellner (1997)described as a postmodernist turn in social analysis.

That was then (in relation to Marxism see in particular Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) 1

and this is today: a situation in which the wave of postmodern thought that had sweptover the landscape and edifice of sociological analysis has ebbed and disappeared into thecracks of its theoretical foundation. The problem is that postmodernism might well bepasse, much as the passage of an infectious disease that leaves behind a measure of reliefbut little of substance. But at the same time there is little evidence of a full recovery areturn to the solid edifice that had been constructed on the foundation of Marxist classanalysis. In this article we argue this point in regard to two contemporary issues of criti-cal sociology: the dynamics of a growing worldwide ecological crisis and the currentdynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America. Both areas of sociologicalanalysis have been seriously affected by the retreat from Marxism, and in need of another

dose of class analysis.

Liberalism vs Marxism: A Matter of Theoretical Perspective

There are two opposing approaches to the analysis of ecological destruction and thedynamics of the indigenous movement in Latin America: liberalism and Marxism. Thefirst can be defined in terms of its focus on the individual as the basic unit of analysis,and action, and the concern with freedom the right of each individual to act in thedirection of self-interest and the expansion of choice and opportunity (Haq 1995; Sen

1999).2 Marxism, in contrast, can be characterized by an emphasis on the relationship ofeach class to the means of production and the class structure that results from the totalityof these relations.

In regard to the nature-development nexus liberals tend to emphasize universalresponsibility for the destruction of the environment the rich and the poor, miningcompanies and miners, factory owners and factory workers, auto manufacturers and drivers,governments and citizens, real estate speculators and slum dwellers. In the same vein, lib-eral ecologists claim that the ecological crisis adversely affects everyone: We are all in thesame boat and we all suffer from the destruction of the environment.

A liberal approach to an analysis of the indigenous movement takes a similar form, using

non-class categories of community, culture and religious belief to present the social struc-ture of indigenous society as relatively homogeneous. In contrast, the Marxist approach toecological destruction and indigenous social movements focuses on relations of productionand power, an inequality of power relations vis-a-vis the means of production, the classdynamics of exposure to contamination in the workplace and neighborhoods, inequality inaccess to land and the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides and other contaminants,and unequal access to the instruments of state power. Marxists focus on the class structure,struggle, inequalities and the class dynamics of the presumed natural and environmentaldisasters unfolding in different parts of the world capitalist system.


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Petras and Veltmeyer:A Class Perspective on Social Ecology 439

Marxists view the dynamics of ethnic and indigenous movements, and issues of politics,policy and leadership related to these dynamics, in terms of their relationship to thebroader class system that is, through the lens and with the optics of class analysis. Theyeschew the liberal reform rhetoric and the discourse on indigenous identity the indigenistideological assumption that indigenous society is composed of homogeneous communi-ties in a direct relation to and in harmony with nature, bound together by a culture ofsolidarity and harmonious undifferentiated ethnic interests without class divisions orconflicting economic and political interests.

This situation might once have described the indigenous communities at the base ofBolivian society. But today and increasingly so the penetration of capitalism and market rela-tions, the extension of capitalist and socialist ideology, and the workings of non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs) funded by the governments and international organizationsinvolved in the project of international cooperation to help the indigenous population

adjust to the forces of change (modernization, industrialization and capitalist development)operating on them,3 have created a class-divided indigenous society. Even Bolivia, stilldefined as 67 percent indigenous,4 is today essentially a class-divided society, with wellover half of so-called indigenous peasants landless or near-landless. Under these condi-tions many indigenous communities have been thoroughly penetrated, converting theminto a massive proletariat, largely and increasingly dependent on labor for their livelihood.5

In actual fact, because of the continuing ties to the land in their communities of originmuch of this indigenous population can best be defined as a semi-proletariat, laboringin the countryside off-farm, for miserable wages on the latifundia of the big and oli-garchical terratentientes (big landlords), or in the ubiquitous informal sector of the

burgeoning cities.6

In this context communalism or communitarianism has emerged as the politicalpractice of the government formed by Evo Morales who has managed to achieve statepower on behalf of, and on the social base of, the indigenous movement (Morales2003). The problem is that communalism so defined serves as an ideology, a way ofmobilizing the indigenous population, but not as political practice. The reason is thatthe level of the indigenous community at the base of Bolivian society communalism orcommunitarianism works (has effective outcomes) because it relates to a culture of socialsolidarity that is based on effective social bonds among comuneros, who are to somedegree to the degree that they continue to live in the local community (many do not

anymore, or as many inhabitants of El Alto, Bolivias second biggest city, return for theharvest or religious festivals) still living (or able to view the world) in a more direct rela-tionship to nature.7

In this context, communitarianism functions as an ideology of an emerging indige-nous middle class, a petit bourgeoisie that has turned to Morales and his regime for polit-ical representation, and an emerging indigenous political class in its contestation of statepower.8 Even though the conditions for translating it into practice clearly do not exist atthe national level, communalism allows this class to mobilize support in its bid forpower (Petras and Veltmeyer 2005a).


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The Class Dynamics of Natural Disaster and Ecological Crisis

To demonstrate the relevance of class analysis to social and political ecology, and the

validity of its application to the dynamics of the indigenous movement in the currentcontext, we briefly review recent environmental issues and contemporaneous indigenousmovements. We have chosen several cases of an apparent environmental disaster withlarge-scale and potentially long-term negative impacts that are all too familiar and welldocumented, even if poorly conceived and under-studied. They include the collapse ofthe cod fishery in the waters off Atlantic Canada, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and afood crisis of global proportions under conditions of global warming and global capitalism.9

The Last Cod: The Collapse of a Fishery

Atlantic Canada, a region of four provinces on the eastern seaboard of the country, forcenturies and until recently was the location and centre of one of the richest fisheries inthe world: the North Atlantic cod, which to all intents and purposes collapsed in the1980s. The result was the loss of livelihood for thousands of people living and workingin the small localities and communities scattered along the shoreline. These communities

were of diverse ethnic composition ranging from Acadian French and Irish immigrantsto diverse aboriginal (indigenous) populations such as the Micmac of Nova Scotia.

What united the localities, i.e. inhabitants sharing space but little else are a fewsocial bonds, some unifying institutions and a loose identity. In many cases these

communities reflected a weak or fractured culture of solidarity, resulting from a capi-talistic culture of individualism (the rational calculation of self-interest, achievementorientation), and a society divided between the poor and not so poor, some well-off andeven rich (Durston 1999).10

Even in the outports of Newfoundland where communities were relatively homogenousin terms of source of livelihood (fishing), the shared physical space and ecology tendedto be socially constructed, with social and class divisions that in many cases inhibited theformation of any culture of solidity or community spirit. Nevertheless, what they didshare, in addition to physical space and ecology, was an abundant resource (the cod) thatsustained the economies of the Basques and the Portuguese for centuries, and the liveli-

hoods of generations of men and women in the new world settlements of Newfoundlandand Nova Scotia (Kurlanski 1997). The cod fishery was so rich and the resource so abun-dant that it sustained the livelihoods and communities of people on both sides of the

Atlantic, allowing a relatively equitable social distribution of the social product, support-ing thereby the formation of communal rather than class relations.

Fishing was an industry based on the three large capitalist enterprises that operatednear-shore and offshore, buying up the locally fished stock, and an occupation and sourceof livelihood for most members of the community. Marine scientists, most of whom livedand worked over a thousand kilometers away in Ottawa and in Europe, have publisheda legion of studies documenting the catastrophic decline in fish stocks, the destruction of


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livelihood of millions of small-scale fishermen and the loss of maritime high protein foodfor tens of millions of poor people. The cause of this disaster, according to ecologists andeconomists in the liberal tradition include rapacious overfishing by greedy corporate cap-

italists, contamination and environmentally unfriendly and destructive technology andpractice, a failure of the state to manage the resource, even the rapacious feeding of seals,and climate change (change in water temperature, etc.). They failed to identify the classcharacter of those responsible or the class dynamics of the capital accumulation process.

It is evident that a large part of the crisis is indeed overfishing but overfishing is notjust a matter of natural resource management. It is the result of the concentration andcentralization of capital in the fishing industry, the workings of large-scale capitalistenterprises that operate massive factory ships with three-mile nets that drag the bottomof the sea, indiscriminately destroying fish habitats and pulling in undersize fish, therebyundermining the resource production cycle and destroying the ecology.

Contamination, a problem that affects both the fish itself and its habitat, the waterson the Grand Banks of the eastern seaboard of North America, is a result of large-scalefish farms, the massive use of chemical fertilizers and the run-off of animal waste whichdestroy the delicately balanced coastal water ecology, as well as oil spills by big petroleumand shipping companies.

State subsidies financed the growth of large fleets with high technology fishing gear,while state deregulation policies favored big fishing companies over the small local artisanf isherfolk and the inshore fisheries. In summary, the worldwide depletion of fishing stockis the result of environmental conditions induced by the operation of the capitalist sys-tem, namely the concentration of fishing industry in a powerful capitalist class, subsi-

dized and promoted by the state, oriented towards and operating in the interests ofcorporate capital (Veltmeyer 2005b).

Hurricane Katrina: The Class Dynamics of Disaster Relief in a Capitalist State

In August 2006 Hurricane Katrina, with winds of over 100 miles an hour, hit bothCuba and the Southern Gulf Coast of the USA, especially Louisiana and Mississippi.The consequences for the people of Cuba and those two southern states were vastly dif-ferent. Several thousand poor, mostly black, American citizens were killed while in

Cuba, under essentially the same conditions, there were fewer than ten deaths. The dif-ference in mortality was a product of the different social systems. Socialist Cuba has ahighly organized and effective, centrally planned civil defense system that puts the high-est priority in diagnosing and anticipating the storm and mobilizing tens of thousandsof civilian and military personnel and sending thousands of public buses and trucks totransport people and their farm animals to safety. In the event of an imminent or pos-sible environmental disaster Cubans are organized and mobilized to prevent even a sin-gle Cuban death. In contrast, the US Government, dominated by the ideology of freemarket capitalism and neoliberal globalization, gave a higher priority to national security,creating a repressive political apparatus (The Department of Homeland Security or DHS)


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that sidelined and weakened FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency),which had been a model of government service, reducing it to a cash-starved, demoralizedand broken agency.

With its obsessive concern with shadowy terrorist threats, and its ruling class pri-orities, the governments ability to respond to threats to the security of its poorest

working class citizens was seriously undermined. The results were catastrophic largelyso in class terms. Hundreds of thousands of low-income residents were abandoned tothe raging storm surge and floodwaters. The middle class generally had the where-

withal (private transportation, etc.) to escape the worst of the crisis, while the workingpoor bore the brunt of the hurricanes devastating force and the governments totallyinadequate mobilization of transport, water supplies and food for the destitute. In theaftermath of the hurricane, Cuba gave the highest priority to rebuilding the homes ofthe displaced people whereas in the USA the capitalist state displaced the poor and

promoted rebuilding to serve the interests of multi-millionaire real estate speculators,commercial interests and tourists.

While the hurricane was a natural event, the unprecedented loss of life in New Orleanswas not. It was the consequence rather of the ruling class priorities of the occupants of theWhite House. The obsessive concern of the regime with international terrorism led it, viathe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Patriot Act, to transform what hadbeen a model of government service into a broken agency unequal to the task of rescuingthe Katrina victims. The obsessive focus of DHS on shadowy terrorist threats under-mined the governments ability to respond to a clear threat to its citizens. The capitalistcharacter of the state led the regime to prioritize perceived threats to national security

over basic civil defense. It favored commercial expansion and speculation over environ-mental safeguards, and self-reliance of vulnerable individuals to fend for themselves overstate planning.

The Global Food Crisis: Capitalism as Normal

Liberal ecologists have argued that natural disasters, excess state intervention in the mar-ket and over-exploitation of land by peasants and farmers are responsible for the foodcrisis, defined as excess demand over supply leading to rising prices. Marxists, on theother hand, argue that free market policies under the Washington Consensus have resultedin the bankruptcy of millions of food-producing peasants and farmers. These policieshave led to the concentration of landownership by giant agribusiness conglomerates thatspecialize in the export of staples and primary commodities, displacing or undermininglocal food production systems, so increasing the price of food for local popular con-sumption.

Neoliberal policies of structural adjustment (privatization, financial and trade liberal-ization, deregulation) have accelerated the workings of what Marx had defined as thegeneral law of capital accumulation the normal capitalist process of concentration and


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centralization of the means of agricultural production (land, fertilizers, marketing, farmmachinery). At the same time the capital accumulation process has led to the conversionof land use by small and medium-sized producers of food for local markets and con-sumption by the people into agribusiness use of land for the production of agriculturalcommodities for the world market and the conversion of food (sugar and corn) for auto-mobile fuel (ethanol). The conversion of food to ethanol, the most dynamic developmentin the process, has led to a massive invasion of finance capital into agriculture, as well asthe demise and destitution of peasants and small farmers, increasing the price of food

while lowering the purchasing power of the urban and rural poor, creating massivehunger in the process.

The combination of the over-exploitation of land and the emerging global food crisis isthe result of the expansion of agro-export production and what David Harvey (2003), afterMarx, conceptualizes as the new imperialism accumulation by dispossession and the pol-

itics of expropriation and rapacious greed. At the centre of this process is the forced out-migration and proletarianization of the direct producer transforming small-scale landownersand land-income poor peasants into a semi-proletariat of rural landless workers. In somecontexts (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, etc.), indigenous communities remainon the margins of the capitalist system as a rural proletariat of informal workers.11 The highprice of agricultural inputs and food, and the low income of peasants in infertile regions,means that small producers have few financial resources to rejuvenate the productivity oftheir land. The food crisis is a direct consequence of the class dynamics of primitive accu-mulation and the expansion of capitalist agriculture a process that determines what is pro-duced, the market for the social product and the cost of reproduction.

Global Warming and Other Dimensions of the Ecological Crisis

The capitalist development of the forces of production involves a large-scale, long-term process of productive and social transformation the conversion of an agrarianor agriculture-based society into a petty commodity industrialized and urbanizedcapitalist system (World Bank 2008).12 There is a widespread consensus on certainfeatures of this process of structural transformation revolving around the capital-labor relation:

1) an unprecedented expansion of societys forces of production, leading to an

enormous growth in the global stock of wealth and wealth-generating assets;

2) growing class divisions in the consumption of this wealth and access to societys

wealth and income generating assets, and an associated polarization at the extremes

of the wealth and income distribution; and

3) a propensity towards crisis, reflected in a structural incapacity of the system to

expand the forces of production, generating in the process the objective and subjective

conditions of revolutionary transformation.


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In recent decades, the propensity of capitalism towards crisis and systemic breakdownhas been manifest in diverse forms production, financial, fiscal and political at thelevel of both economic activity and the ecological foundation of this activity. Today thecrisis is manifest primarily, or most visibly, in the meltdown of global finance, putting atrisk not just the speculative and productive investments of global capital but the savingsand pensions (and thus the social security) of millions of people in the middle and work-ing classes worldwide.

The ecological crisis (in recent years materializing in the question of global warming)has come to the fore, overshadowing a more general systemic crisis in overproduction andunsustainable growth. This is a crisis brought back on the agenda by the deepening finan-cial crisis that is assuming global proportions. The cause of this triple crisis (financial,production and ecological) according to liberal ecologists is the excessive and wasteful con-sumption of non-renewable resources and fossil fuels, the failure of state regulation and

management, and the economic growth imperative of industrialization. Their concern isnot with the systemic features of capitalist development, viz. its propensity towards crisis,but the need for more sustainable practices and careful resource management.

Class analysis, on the other hand, provides a diagnosis that is at once more systemicand more specific. For example, the capitalist owners of the auto-industry were in a posi-tion and had the power to dictate transport policy that destroyed public transportation,eliminating subsidies and lowering budgetary funding for electric light rail while chan-neling billions of dollars into highways, bridges and road maintenance for private vehi-cles. The massive increase in CO2 was a result of the power of the privately ownedautomobile industry over publicly owned railroads. The widespread use of highly con-

taminating private autos was a result of advertising that promoted the purchase of biggas-guzzling automobiles depicting them as status symbols: The bigger the car, the higherthe profit, the greater the contamination.

Private and public manufacturers who operate on the market principle of increasedproduction, lower costs and higher returns have been the driving force of industrial pol-lution. It is not industrialization per se that leads to pollution. The technology, produc-tive and organizational processes that could substantially reduce or eliminate pollutionexist but they would increase immediate costs and lower profit. State policies that dereg-ulate control over pollution levels are the result of capitalist power. The problem of global

warming is not the responsibility of individual car owners or workers in polluting facto-

ries. The responsibility for industrial pollution and high C02 levels leading to climatechange rests in the capitalist class that owns the means of pollution and drives the accu-mulation process, the capitalist state with the power to regulate the means of pollutionand the capitalist system that governs global production.

A Class Perspective on the Indigenous Movement

Liberal writers on indigenous movements and indigenous communities conceptualizethem mistakenly as homogeneous. They understate the degree of capitalist penetration,


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class differentiation and subsequent political polarization. Liberal writers adopt a simplisticbipolar view in which classless indigenous communities are counterposed to an undif-ferentiated white society. Operating through this classless conception, liberals argue insupport of communitarian politics and micro-projects. Their politics are based on a pre-sumed culture of social solidarity in which cultural traditions are treated as bonds thatlink the upwardly mobile indigenous petit bourgeoisie, and an emerging class of politi-cal and business leaders, to the mass of landless rural workers and semi-proletarianizedpeasants.

Marxist class analysis is based on several key theoretical assumptions grounded in solidempirical research and historical case studies. They indicate that capitalist penetration ofindigenous communities deepened pre-existing social differences, leading to the forma-tion of a class divided society.13 In this, a small group of indigenous leaders constitutedthemselves (and were capacitated to do so in a strategy of ethnodevelopment pursued,

inter alia, by the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank (World Bank1996, 2004) as intermediaries. The explicit goal of this strategy of ethnodevelopment,

which targeted elements of the indigenous community with leadership potential, was tomediate between the communities of the mostly indigenous rural poor and the outside

world. According to World Bank propaganda, these training programs were designed toensure their inclusion in essential government services (education, health, etc.) and improvetheir access to the market, as well as capacitating the rural poor for self-development,empowering them to act on their own behalf in taking one of two pathways out of ruralpoverty available to them (labor, migration).14

Speaking in the name of indigenous communities, these intermediaries in fact were

transformed into directors of nongovernmental organizations or capitalist entrepreneurs owners of transport (trucks), local commercial buyers and sellers, moneylenders, com-mercial farmers. Rather than sending their children to public schools taught in regionalindigenous languages, their children went to private schools taught in Spanish in orderto become professionals, politicians, lawyers and heads of NGOs specializing in indigenousissues and linked to foreign foundations, government agencies and the World Bank.

These linkages between an upwardly mobile indigenous petit bourgeoisie andnational and international capital have not been without tension, conflict and compe-tition. Two types of conflict emerged. At one level the mass of the impoverished indige-nous population is exploited by capitalist agribusiness via an expropriation or

dispossession of their means of production by violent or legal (political) means. Thisexploitation has operated through semi-feudal forms of serfdom as well as the capitalistforms of wage labor (even slavery, in some contexts) and repression by the capitaliststate. At another level, the rising indigenous petit bourgeoisie competed with and con-fronted the mestizo/European national and global ruling class, which imposed limits ontheir access to economic resources, finance, credit, markets and land and limited and mar-ginalized their political role.

The goal of the indigenous elite was to share power with the white oligarchy, not tooverthrow it. Evo Morales, in his political practice since January 2006, when he assumedstate power with the support of a mobilized indigenous movement, provides the precise


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formulae for class collaboration in a declaration of his intention to interact with the traditionaloligarchs and emergent bourgeoisie as partners not bosses.15 To open the doors to thesharing of wealth and power, the marginalized petit bourgeois indigenous minorityneeded organized mass power to threaten, pressure and force an intransigent ruling classto negotiate with them.

The politics of the indigenous social movements reflect the dual class basis of indige-nous society: a revolutionary impoverished peasant mass base and a reformist petit bour-geois leadership. Political influence and government office had two different meaningsfor the two elements of indigenous society. For the mass of semi-proletarianized and poorindigenous peasants it means integral land reform, socialized and nationalized produc-tion in key economic sectors and communalism in the distribution and sharing of thesocial product. For the indigenous petit bourgeoisie it means collaboration with theproductive agribusiness sector, the distribution of marginal public land and profit

sharing between the indigenous and economic elite in the private and foreign-ownedextractive sectors.

The class differentiation within indigenous society and the emergence of conflictingeconomic and political interests, both overt and covert, became evident with the turn inthe 1990s of a sector of the indigenous movements from mass movement-direct actionpolitics towards electoral politics. Morales constructed a political instrument for contest-ing national and local elections. This turn towards electoral politics corresponded to athreefold fragmentation of the indigenous movement, with some elements orientedtoward a social movement politics of mass mobilization, another towards electoral politics,and a third toward the non-power politics of local development based on a policy of

administrative decentralization, good governance (the inclusion of civil society in theresponsibility for social development and political order) and a community-based indige-nous culture of social solidarity (Atria et al. 2004; Durston 1999; Lesbaupin 2000).

Ecuador: 20002003

In 2000 the Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the form of CONAIE played a lead-ing role in the overthrow of the bourgeois government of Jamil Mahuad. Three years laterthe indigenous movement in the political form of Pachakutik, a party formed in 1995 to

contest the national and local elections, entered into an electoral alliance with a retiredmilitary officer (Lucio Gutirrez). After Gutirrez won the presidency, Pachakutik lead-ers were appointed to several ministries, including the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and

Agriculture. Within a year, in total disregard of an understanding reached with the lead-ership of CONAIE, the Gutirrez regime proceeded to implement a neoliberal agenda,privatizing oil fields, repressing labor, defending and extending support to an amalgamof large agribusiness exporters, foreign multinationals and banks, and signing off on anintrusive security pact with the USA.

In the wake of mass opposition at the base of the social movement, Pachakutik leadersin the government were forced to resign from office. CONAIE lost significant membership


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and was severely demoralized and fragmented. The mass of poor indios at the base ofthe movement were and felt betrayed by the political deals their petit bourgeois leadershad made with the oligarchs. Today, the movement is still a shadow of what it was in the1990s, at the height of its mobilized social and political power when it managed to arrestthe neoliberal agenda of several regimes, and depose several presidents.

Bolivia: 20035

Between 2003 and 2005 Bolivias indigenous movement of coca-producing peasant pro-ducers, led by Evo Morales, formed an alliance with factory workers, unemployed andinformal workers of the city slums and militant miners to overthrow two bourgeoisregimes, those of Snchez de Lozada (2003) and Carlos Mesa (2005). In both uprisingsthe petit bourgeois leadership of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) played a minor rolein the mass struggle. Mainly it intervened to block a revolutionary transformation andimposed a neoliberal substitute (Carlos Mesa) in 2003 and a caretaker bourgeois regime(Rodriguez) in July 2005. In his bid for the presidency, Evo Morales and his followerschanneled the social and political forces of resistance and opposition into the electoralprocess, which culminated in a successful electoral campaign for the presidency.

After more than three years in office, property and class relations remain unchanged.Class and income inequalities between the European/mestizo ruling and middle class,and the indigenous majority of Bolivias rural and urban poor have remained in place.

What did change was the social structure of indigenous society, as a whole new strata of

former indigenous social movement leaders and civil society activists were rewarded witha number of mostly second level government positions. The Morales regime providedsubsidies for restraining and channeling their followers into supporting the government.Numerous mestizo semi-professionals occupied high government offices and rose in thestatus hierarchy of wealth and influence. The mass of indigenous peasants, however, weredemobilized and re-mobilized according to the tactical needs of the Morales regime in itsnegotiations with the big bourgeoisie.

Moraless accommodation of the traditional ruling class led to its rapid recovery ofpower following the insurrection of May/June 2005. They did not agree to share power

with the Indian President Morales. The issue in conflict was not inequality of land own-

ership, which was never questioned by the governing MAS regime: 100 European fami-lies in the eastern lowlands continued to own and still do 80 percent of the arable landin the region after close to three years of Moraless presidency. At issue was the sharing ofpolitical power, state revenues, and co-government between the flexible government of apetit bourgeois indigenous leader from the movements and an intransigent and thor-oughly racist big bourgeoisie (Kohl and Farthing 2006; Webber 2005). The entire periodof the Morales presidency became a struggle between petit bourgeois indigenous liberaldemocracy and a quasi-fascist European/mestizo oligarchy based in regional govern-ments in the eastern lowlands. The middle class in this and other struggles fractured, someelements ranged in support of the government and some in political opposition.


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Faced with fascist threats to eliminate political freedoms, racial equality (constitutionalcitizen rights), access to individual social mobility, local autonomy and the right to col-lective organization, the indigenous peasants and working class masses overwhelminglybacked the Morales regime against the advance of the fascist ruling oligarchs. As a result,the real divergence of class interests between the propertyless and impoverished indige-nous masses and the upwardly mobile pro-capitalist indigenous petit bourgeois profes-sionals and leaders was subordinated to the common struggle against the racist andquasi-fascist capitalist regional power bloc.

Conclusion

The main conclusion derived from our brief analytical probes into several dimensions ofthe nature-society relation is that the dynamics of this nexus cannot be understood exceptby reference to the workings of a global capital accumulation process.

In regard to the indigenous question our study of Ecuador and Bolivia pointtowards communitarianism as an ideology of a rising indigenous petit bourgeoisie con-cerned to undermine intra-indigenous class struggle. The defining reality of indigenoussociety in the Andes is that it is class divided. This division is reflected in a conflictbetween a petit bourgeoisie struggling to join and share power with the dominant classand a mass of impoverished indios without property or influence over state policy. Inshort, there are two intertwined class struggles, one led by a new political class of indige-nous professionals to consolidate a liberal democracy and backed by the masses mysti-

fied by religious and cultural symbolism, and another led by class conscious predominantlyindigenous workers and peasants against the ruling class and their own indigenous petitbourgeois leaders.

Our analysis suggests that neither the ecological nor the indigenous movements ishomogeneous in the economic and political interests at issue. Beneath a veneer of com-mon goals against ecological destruction and exploitation of indigenous peoples are twodiametrically opposed ideologies liberalism and Marxism based on different classinterests and political agendas.

Marxism as ideology and theory highlights the centrality of property in the means ofproduction and the class dynamics of the associated social relations and politics as criti-

cal to understanding the destruction of the environment and indigenous politics. Theclassless form of analysis and approach advanced by liberal ecologists and the ideologuesof indigenous communalism is found to be seriously flawed. The liberal approach is intel-lectually inadequate and politically disastrous. It fails to provide the intellectual andpolitical tools needed to generate an effective, globally sustainable, environmental move-ment. Liberal communitarian ideology does not provide the intellectual basis for theemancipation of the urban and rural poor and the indigenous peoples in Latin America.Environmental sustainability and indigenous liberation are inextricable parts of the classstruggle against the further advance of capitalism. To this end, what is needed is a clearerunderstanding of the workings of capitalism. There is no solution within capitalism to


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the problems of an impending ecological disaster, the world economic depression, or themultiple forms of exploitation faced by indigenous peoples. A minimal condition is areconstituted form of class analysis as a guide to an eco-socialist revolution.

Notes

1 For a critique of Laclau and Mouffes efforts to transcend Marxism in a poststructuralist critique see

Veltmeyer (2000). For more general critical discussions of the theoretical impasse vis-a-vis Marxism

and other forms of structuralism, and the postmodern turn in social and development analysis, see

Brass (2000), Petras and Veltmeyer (2005b), and Veltmeyer (1997).

2 This assumption and precept defines liberalism in its diverse forms: neoclassical economics in its

belief in the magic of the market; the new political economy of Kreuger, Bates etc. in its conception

of the state as a predatory apparatus subject to rentierism (self-seeking behavior of state officials andoccupants of state power); and political science in the tradition of liberal democracy. Liberalism also

underpins the mainstream development thinking and practice in the field of international develop-

ment and permeates all of the concepts (human development, development as freedom, empower-

ment, equity, etc.) within this framework. On this see Veltmeyer (2007).

3 Sociologists and theorists of development have conceptualized the process of long-term societal

change in terms of three meta-theories, each associated with a distinct narrative: 1) modernization

(transformation of a traditional system into a modern one);2) industrialization (transformation of

an agrarian society into an industrial society); and 3) capitalist development (the productive and

social transformation of a precapitalist system based on direct production into a modern capitalist

system of commodity production and wage labour). On these meta-theories see OMalley (2010) and

Veltmeyer (2009).4 Fifty-five million indigenous persons, or 400 indigenous peoples, inhabit Indo-Afro-Latin America.

Most reside in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. They reject the Europe-imposed term

Indians and call themselves the native peoples (Ios pueblos originarios in Spanish). They are esti-

mated to constitute 67 percent of Bolivias population and 40 percent of Ecuadors.

5 Labor takes two major forms in Bolivia and other such contexts: wage labor and self-employment

(labor, or micro-enterprise, in the unstructured informal sector that makes up close to one half of

the urban economically active population (Portes et al. 1989).

6 In Bolivia it is estimated that just three latifundistas in the Eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz own as

much land as 21 counties combined. This level of concentration in the ownership of land is not

unusual; indeed it is the norm in much of Latin America (Kay 2000).

7 Indigenous culture is generally understood in these terms. Thus, those that partake of this cultureand live in the world that it constructs are very conscious of their connection to nature and to each

other, viewing the natural world (mother earth, etc.) not as a productive resource for profit making

but as the common heritage for all humankind. By the same token, adherents of this view and par-

ticipants in this traditional culture do not recognize the rights of private (or public, for that matter)

property over the land to privatize the commons.

8 In an interview withPunto Final(May 2003, pp. 1617) Evo Morales, leader of the major political

force on Bolivias left and currently in the country, the Movimiento al Socialismo-Instrumento Poltico

para la Soberana de los Pueblos(MAS-IPSP), defined socialism in terms of communitarianism. This

is, he notes, because in the ayllu (the principal Aymara territorial unit) people live in community,

with values such as solidarity and reciprocity. This, he added, is our (political) practice.


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9 Notwithstanding the depth and severity of the social crisis, an even worse crisis is looming,

threatening to take down the basic pillars of the economic production and development process.

This crisis has to with the ecological foundations not only of the economic production process but

life itself. The logic of capital accumulation and the economic processes of industrialization and mod-ernization have pushed the system well beyond its ecological limits. Ecologists of various persuasions

have raised their voices in unison about an impending ecological crisis evident in the clear signs that

the carrying capacity of the earths ecosystem has been stressed well beyond its limits, with an

irreparable and irreversible damage to the systems that sustain human life and livelihoods. The col-

lapse of fish stocks discussed below is but one small part of this process which has been well docu-

mented, and analyzed in depth but to little avail (and, in any case, too little, too late).

10 The new paradigm of empowerment of the poor, based on a policy of decentralization, local devel-

opment and social capital, and promoted by diverse advocates of a more socially inclusive form of

neoliberalism, is predicated on a community-based culture of solidarity (Razeto 1989, 1993).

Unfortunately for the proponents of this paradigm, more often than not, according to the ECLAC

economist John Durston (1999), this traditional or indigenous culture in many cases has been weak-ened by the incursions of a capitalistic culture and economic practice, which in effect has tended to

extinguish this community spirit, transforming local communities into mere localities (Veltmeyer

and OMalley 2003).

11 The informal sector is composed of enterprises (businesses) or activities (self-employed labor) that are

unable to make use of the legal apparatus of the state. See De Soto (Albright and De Soto 2007) or the

World Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor for a sanguine view of this development

as an opportunity for the poor to exhibit or cultivate an innate entrepreneurial or capitalist spirit.

12 For a critique of this conception of long-term social change, and the theory of modernization under-

lying it, see Veltmeyer (2008).

13 Bengoa (2000) attributes the emergence of identity politics among indigenous peoples in Latin

America to one of several unanticipated effects of the forces of globalization that have swept theregion. Indeed, one of the ironies of these so-called forces is that at one and the same time they

seem to have helped spread the ageless struggle for universal human rights and social justice, accen-

tuate a myriad of local particularities, and shape the formation of new ethnic and national identities

and conflicts across the world. In the 1990s, this resurgence of the indigenous question took

the form of widespread mobilization of the most diverse social forces organized over the previous

decade, primarily in the struggle for land and opposition to exclusionary government policies. The

decade began with a major uprising, in May 1990, of indigenous peasants in the highlands of

Ecuador, and within a few years, in January 1994, there occurred, in Chiapas, Mexico, one of the

most significant irruptions of indigenous struggle onto the stage of national and regional politics

in Latin America. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas brought the struggles and social movements

of indigenous peoples across Latin America onto the center stage of world history, thereby extend-ing the short century declared by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1984) and giving the lie to his

view that the indigenous question, like that of the peasantry, had disappeared into the dustbins of

history. In subsequent years, from 1994 to the present, the uprising of indigenous peasant farmers

and communities in Ecuador and Mexico became part of a broader popular movement. By the end

of the decade and turn of the new millennium, the indigenous question in Latin America had

taken center stage in a broad popular struggle against the forces of modernization and change,

neoliberalism and global capitalism.

14 In this strategy the World Bank (2008) conceptualizes three pathways out of rural poverty but it is all

too aware that the vast majority of the indigenous rural poor are blocked from taking the pathway of

farming, requiring as it does conversion into capitalist entrepreneurs with access to capital and tech-

nology as well as the market.


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15 In May 2007, in the context of legislation allowing the government to renationalize ownership of the

countrys mineral resources, the government renewed contracts with 42 oil companies on the basis of

a joint venture or partnership arrangement. In this context the government announced that we do

not need bosses; we need partners.

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