Making our time: the dispute over society's predictive horizons. Interview with Álvaro García Linera

Abstract

This interview with Álvaro García Linera presents a deep reflection on the relationship between the national-popular and populism, two key concepts for analyzing Latin American politics. García Linera's preference for the former lies on its extraordinary explanatory capacity to understand heterogeneous plebeian social struggles, the construction of political subjects and revolutionary transformations. Nourished by the Gramscian debate of the 1980s, García Linera combines it with the Marxist discussion to account for the configuration of social classes that in Latin America, and especially in Bolivia, has a deep ethnic charge. The national-popular is the way of practical historical realization of the struggles of plebeian classes for their autonomy and self-determination, whose characteristics and destiny are not pre-established beyond the very course of political action. This is the plebeian moment, which always erupts as a state overflow, although paradoxically it needs to be temporarily instituted in the state in order to consolidate and universalize itself. According to García Linera, the national-popular only arises during the crisis of the domination and accumulation regimes. In the course of this interregnum, what he calls "weakening of the predictive horizon" takes place, while the "collective willingness to revoke beliefs" is activated.