Morozov 2016

Indigeneity and subaltern subjectivity
in decolonial discourses: a comparative

study of Bolivia and Russia
Viatcheslav Morozov* and Elena Pavlova
Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Lossi 36, 51003 Tartu, Estonia.
E-mail: morozov@ut.ee
*Corresponding author.
Abstract The decolonial discourse of buen vivir in South America has declared the
need to overcome Eurocentrism by tapping into indigenous knowledge. We compare the
Bolivian version of this project with the conservative turn in Russian politics to
demonstrate that they make a structurally analogous argument and they both end up
with a false promise. The fullness of indigenous being that underlies such discourses is a
Eurocentric, romanticist myth, which contributes to the silencing of the subaltern by
imposing on them political categories not directly rooted in any genuine native expe-
rience. We reformulate postcolonial critique using Laclau’s theory of populism to
suggest that subaltern subjectivity can only emerge in a bottom-up manner, through the
aggregation and universalisation of local demands. While it might still be true that the
subaltern cannot speak, there is no way for the subaltern to come into being other than
through speaking politically.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2016).
doi:10.1057/s41268-016-0076-7
Keywords: Bolivia; indigeneity; postcolonial theory; Russia; subalternity; subjectivity
Introduction: in search of a native

The normative agenda of postcolonial studies often includes the imperative of
identifying an alternative to the Eurocentric mode of development. It originates in
the very core of the postcolonial project, with its critique of Eurocentrism, and
often translates into a search for authenticity uncontaminated by Western
colonialism. It is suggested that only by leaving behind our capitalist, consumerist
lifestyles and embracing indigenous experiences could we hope to build a more
sustainable and humane society. To differentiate from scholars who see their main
mission as limited to postcolonial critique, this explicitly normative approach is
sometimes labelled ‘decolonial’ (e.g. Dussel 1995; Quijano 2000; for a useful
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2016 www.palgrave.com/journals

2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/16
Journal of International Relations and Development
overview, see Maldonado-Torres 2011). As argued by Walter Mignolo (2007: 452),

‘[t]he decolonial shift […] is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism
and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy’. In other
words, the decolonial turn postulates a radical epistemological break with the
Western tradition and urges the intellectuals to ‘craft another space for the
production of knowledge’ (Escobar 2007: 179, see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013).
This article aims to expose certain irreparable flaws in the decolonial normative
project, which stem from its underlying ontological assumptions. First of all, its
quest for authenticity is an attempt to locate the subject of emancipation based on a
certain generalised idea of history. Even though the decolonial approach normally
strives to distance itself from the traditional left, its appeal to the native is
analogous to the positioning of workers as the fundamental class in classical
Marxism. This observation brings forward a range of nagging issues faced by
contemporary Marxist thought, but unlike in (post-)Marxism, these issues are, with
a few notable exceptions, neglected by decolonial scholars. Secondly, the native is
inevitably orientalised: he performs the same function as ‘the noble savage’ in the
colonialist paradigm.1 As a result, the decolonial discourse constructs, in a top-
down manner, an abstract and romanticised figure of the native and claims to speak
on his behalf. Meanwhile, the real subaltern remains silenced by the colonial
structure which continues largely unchanged.
Our argument is illustrated with a critique of the South American decolonial
discourse. Our primary focus is on the Bolivian project of vivir bien, which we
compare with the conservative discourse that emerged in Russia after the political
protests of 2011–2012 and the re-election of Vladimir Putin as president. In spite of
being rooted in two radically different historical and ideological backgrounds, the
two cases overlap in a number of key structural points. Most importantly, both
postulate authentic native being and contrast it to the uprooted, colonised life under
global capitalism. Despite claims to the contrary, both attempt to ‘prove the
ontological superiority of the Oriental [or non-Western] mind’, and thus display
characteristic marks of ‘Orientalism in reverse’ (al-’Azm 2000: 232). Its effect
consists of silencing the subaltern by inviting her go to back to her pre-modern
misery instead of fighting for her rights in the real world that she lives in.2 Hence,
the comparison further proves our point that any search for indigenous authenticity
is, at the core, a conservative project. It also suggests that a wider comparative
research agenda, bringing together post-communist and postcolonial studies, could
significantly enhance our understanding of semi-peripheral politics.
Our analysis of Russia draws mostly on our already published research (in
particular, Morozov 2015), whose results are interpreted here against a somewhat
different theoretical background and based on updated empirical evidence. In both
cases, we illustrate our argument with examples from leadership speeches and
media debates. The core part of the empirical material for the Bolivian case,
however, derives from 15 in-depth interviews with the residents of Cochabamba
Viatcheslav Morozov and Elena Pavlova
Indigeneity and subaltern subjectivity in decolonial discourses
3
and La Pas, conducted by Elena Pavlova in December 2014. The interviewees came
from diverse socioeconomic, cultural and racial backgrounds, but the majority has a
university education, some participants have a PhD. The key criterion for selecting
the respondents was an active political position and direct involvement with issues
of indigenous politics. The interviews were carried out individually, in Spanish,
and most were tape-recorded with the consent of the respondents. Only four
interviews are cited directly in this article, but all 15 are listed in the list of
references, since each interviewee provided valuable insights into the decolonial
project and its perception by the society.
In theoretical terms, our approach relies on a broad spectrum of contemporary
critical thought centred around the issues of hegemony, and popular subjectivity.
To begin, we go back to postcolonial critique of essentialist epistemologies by
revisiting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988, 1999) questioning of the possibility
to access subaltern consciousness, as well as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000)
scepticism regarding the project of ‘provincialising Europe’ from within the
Eurocentric domain of Western academe. In order to fully develop our argument,
we then reframe it in terms of neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985) and Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) theory of populism. Apart from
enabling us to expand our empirical perspective beyond the conventional
postcolonial context, this theoretical reframing helps reconsider the relationship
between the being and the voice of the subaltern. As our analysis suggests,
voiceless subalternity is an illusion: the subaltern comes into being by voicing a
political demand.
The subaltern, the peasant or the political subject?

The fact that a number of South American states recently declared a new stage of
decolonisation might seem a surprising development, given that these nations have
just celebrated the 200th anniversary of their independence. However, the
establishment of national statehood did not eliminate colonial structures in society:
discrimination of the indigenous population has remained a serious challenge for
most Latin American countries up until today. Pablo González Casanova concluded
back in 1969 that external colonisation had given way to internal colonialism
(González Casanova 1969). Almost half a century later, the region remains locked
in the vicious circle of dependent development, with neither statist nor pro-market
policies being able to deliver the desired goals of economic wellbeing and social
justice for all (Ellner 2012).
Against this background, the decolonial turn in South American politics has been
hailed by a number of scholars as the beginning of a new ‘post-neoliberal’ era, as
no longer focusing on ‘alternative development strategies’, but rather on
‘alternatives to development’ (Escobar 2010). According to this view, the
development paradigm has been discredited as signalling ‘more than just material
progress and economic growth; it has marked a western model of judgement and
control over life itself’ (Walsh 2010: 15). The transformation has indeed been
profound: in the two most radical cases, the governments of Bolivia and Ecuador
did not limit their programmes to changing the social structure, but proclaimed a
decolonisation of the entire system of knowledge by abandoning the principles of
European Enlightenment in favour of the so-called Andean worldview (Howard
2009; Gudynas 2015; Radcliffe 2015: 861–867).
This project is best known under the Spanish name of buen vivir (‘living well’
or ‘good living’).3 Summarising the diverse interpretations of this strategy, one
could say that its core is constituted by the ideals of communitarianism and
environmental awareness (Farah and Vasapollo 2011). It is based on a non-
anthropocentric image of the world which emphasises mutual assistance and
exchange, prioritising societal wellbeing over individual gain (Medina 2011). The
Western idea of linear progress is rejected in favour of multi-vector coexistence,
while multiculturalism is viewed as inadequate to accommodate the real
multiplicity of cultures and historical pathways (Gudynas 2011; cf. Ndlovu-
Gatsheni 2013). Similarly, ontological dualism opposing humanity to nature is
denounced as Eurocentric (Quijano 2000). It is claimed that nature ‘is not an
‘‘apolitical’’ entity […]. Rather, its constitution as ontologically distinct is at the
heart of the antagonism that continues to exclude ‘‘indigenous beliefs’’ from
conventional politics’. Overcoming the binary logic of antagonism implies
viewing indigenous politics ‘as a controversy nested within more than one and
less than many socionatural worlds’, encompassing both humans and ‘other-than-
humans’ (Cadena 2010: 350, 352). In some interpretations, the idea of an organic
community living in harmony with nature finds its institutional expression in the
plurinational state, which undertakes to protect the native population from
assimilation by ensuring their political representation in a constitutionally
asymmetrical system (Pallares 2002: 187–189).
The evolution of discourse and political practice in countries such as Bolivia and
Ecuador must also be seen in the context of the debate about colonialism,
hegemony and empire, which is much wider both geographically and conceptually.
It is an established view in the postcolonial studies literature that the colonial
encounter has ‘forever marked colonized and ex-colonized societies […] so that it
is impossible to recuperate any identity uncontaminated by it’ (Kapoor 2008: 8; see
also Ashcroft 1996; Gandhi 1998). Decolonial and postcolonial critique has been
deployed virtually in every region of the world: not just on its native soil in Africa
(e.g. Mbembe 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013) and India (the home turf for
Chakrabarty, Kapoor and Spivak, among others) but notably also in post-Soviet
Central Asia (Tlostanova 2010; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2012) and Central and
Eastern Europe (Kołodziejczhyk and Şandru 2012; Annus 2016).
5
In studies of empire, both as a general form (Hardt and Negri 2000; Münkler
2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013) and as a history of specific polities (e.g. Lieven
2000; Cannadine 2001; Motyl 2001), what inevitably comes to highlight are its
non-linear nature, and the interdependence and mutual penetration of the centre and
the periphery. The Russian case, however, seems to be particularly inspiring in this
regard: it has given rise to a range of paradoxical concepts, such as ‘affirmative
action empire’ (Martin 2001), ‘internal colonisation’ (Etkind 2011; see also
Hosking 2001) and ‘subaltern empire’ (Tlostanova 2008; Morozov 2015).
One point that is clearly suggested by the literature on empire, in all its diversity,
is that both Bolivia and Russia need to be considered not just as sovereign polities,
but as elements of the global hegemonic order. As the Bolivian debate about
internal colonialism makes clear, the Bolivian state is both an agent of global
empire and a subaltern element, marginalised by the forces of capitalist
globalisation. Despite the economic and social dynamism generated by the mining
industries as early as the late 1880s, the autochthonous population faced serious
obstacles to vertical social mobility. Around the mid-1950s, unmitigated discrim-
ination gave way to a ‘softer’ hierarchy, in which vertical mobility became
possible, but only upon the condition of denouncing one’s native heritage. The
2006 election of the first native president, Evo Morales, signified a radical change:
the advancement of the interests of the natives, comprising about 40 per cent of the
population, was to become the mission of the newly established ‘plurinational’
state.
Russia, on the other hand, is customarily placed among the big European
empires: despite its peripheral position, it is described as a colonial power in
relation to its own periphery (including the ‘internal’ one). Our take is different: we
treat them Bolivia and Russia as structurally similar cases whose positions on the
core–periphery axis differ, but not to a point of invalidating any comparison. In
viewing Russia as a subaltern empire, we build on the approach elaborated
systematically by one of us in a recent book (Morozov 2015). In the course of its
modern development, the country was integrated in the hegemonic order and even
became an imperial centre in its own right. Yet, the Russian empire colonised its
periphery as an agent of the global capitalist core: its economic development was
driven by harvesting raw materials (fur, grain and, later, hydrocarbons) for the
more developed nations (Kagarlitsky 2008; Etkind 2011), while its identity was
forever torn apart between belonging to and exclusion from the European
civilisation (Neumann 1996; Prozorov 2008). The lack of recognition by the other
great powers (Ringmar 2002; Neumann 2008), the effects of late socialisation into
European international society whose norms remained beyond Russia’s control
(Zarakol 2011) produced the contradictory cyclical dynamic of catch-up moderni-
sation interchanging with conservative reaction. Both have been framed around the
symbolic figure of the native, an authentic Russian whom the nationalists have
invariably embraced while the Westernisers have sought to civilise and thus
eliminate.
The figure of the native is a product of internal colonisation — a complex
interplay of alienation and appropriation in how the Russian empire treated its
‘own’ people (above all, the Russian peasants, see Etkind 2002, 2011; Hosking
2001). The possibility of ‘internal decolonisation’ has also been explored in the
context of Russian imperial history, with empirical examples of decolonial
discourse going as far back as the late eighteenth century (Etkind 1998: 59–61;
Uffelmann 2012). It has, however, been noted that ‘[t]he decolonially oriented
elites have also reproduced the colonial distance by using a certain vocabulary and
keeping a certain communication routine […]. Moreover, romantisation of the
internal object of colonisation, i.e. ‘‘the people’’, aimed at decolonisation, preserves
this distance’ (Uffelmann 2012: 75). The acceptance of buen vivir in the academic
literature is also far from universal; it has been criticised, inter alia, as a project
designed to provide legitimacy to the existing regimes (Postero 2007) and as being
out of sync with contemporary realities (Sánchez Parga 2011). Most importantly
from our perspective, scholars such as Pedro Portugal Mollinedo (2011) and Carlos
Macusaya (2015) point out that competing interpretations of the ‘genuine’ native
legacy completely ignore the grassroots needs and demands of the indigenous
population. We agree with these assessments, but would like to take the critique to
a new level by grounding it in a different theoretical context and expanding its
empirical reach.
Before we embark on this mission, one clarification is in order. The idea of buen
vivir has been articulated in an almost endless variety of ways. It is promoted both
by government officials (Choquehuanca Céspedes 2011; Ramı́rez Gallegos 2010)
and independent intellectuals; most see it as a practical necessity, but it can also be
envisaged as a utopian horizon (Lao-Montes, 2011). The proponents of different
interpretations often attack each other viciously; thus, both Bolivian and Ecuadoran
governments are accused of misinterpreting and misapplying native ideas in their
policies (Fernández et al. 2014; Swampa 2015). Similarly, the attempts by David
Harvey, a British scholar working in Ecuador, to combine indigenous knowledge
and neo-Marxism in a new theory of development, have sparked a heated debate
(see Gudynas 2015; Martı́nez et al. 2015). There is also a constant struggle between
intellectuals of Native American and Creole origin around the question of who is
better positioned to interpret the indigenous tradition.4
In this article we stay away from these debates, not because we find them
uninteresting on their own merit, but because our main criticism of buen vivir
remains above the issue of how to best access and interpret indigenous knowledge.
Rather, it is directed against the idea of ‘decolonisation of knowledge’ as such. We
contend that internal decolonisation amounts to nothing more than a re-articulation
of the same colonial matrix and, thus, does not advance the emancipation of the
subaltern classes. Consequently, we focus on the main assumptions behind buen
7
vivir which are shared by the entire spectrum of its supporters, or at least a vast
majority thereof. At this level of generalisation, we have to assume that the
phenomenon we study is relatively homogenous, although we certainly keep in
mind that there is an almost endless plurality of voices speaking in the name of the
native population. We find it crucial to formulate our critical points at the general
level, before they can be tested, and perhaps in some cases refuted, in the course of
a more detailed empirical investigation.
The argument that buen vivir bears within itself, and perpetuates, certain
elements of colonial legacy, is hardly new as such: the primary critique is that it
continues with the exoticisation of ‘the Indian’ in a typically Eurocentric manner
(e.g. Portugal Mollinedo 2010; Macusaya 2015). Unlike our predecessors, however,
we frame this claim as a theoretical one and use empirical research to illustrate this
wider theoretical point. In other words, we assert that the empirically observable
failures of the attempts to liberate the indigenous population from above do not
result from contingent misdirection of the emancipatory policies, but are the
necessary outcomes of how these policies are conceived. We insist that, in order to
overcome this structural predicament, one would need to abandon the whole
paradigm of the decolonial discourse and start building an emancipatory project
from the bottom up.
Speaking for the subaltern

Our point of departure is located on the home turf of postcolonial theory, but in that
area where most decolonial thinkers would hardly feel at home. Their project is
about abandoning the Eurocentric language of Western academe and adopting the
indigenous idiom, which is there for everyone to grasp. There are, however, serious
reasons to doubt that such suppressed ways of knowing and speaking about the
world can be easily accessible or, indeed, that they exist at all. Such scepticism is
rooted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) questioning of the subaltern’s
capacity to speak. For Spivak, the problem of political (and thus discursive)
representation is a definitional feature of the subaltern as a category. The dominant
groups tend to confuse two modes of representation: speaking about the subaltern
(i.e. describing their situation, representing them) and speaking for the subaltern
(i.e. having them ‘voiced over’ by intermediaries who do not share their
experience). This last mode is inevitably used also by the Western intellectuals
eager to appropriate subaltern experiences. Regardless of the speaker’s intentions,
it has a powerful silencing effect — hence the title, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’.
Being spoken for is probably the key criterion that defines subalternity for
Spivak, while representation of the subaltern is one of the main problems she
struggles with (see also Kapoor 2008: 41–59). Having been criticised for her
pessimism, Spivak modified her position, acknowledging that citizenship and
voting, in particular, are ‘indeed the symbolic circuit of the mobilizing of

subalternity into hegemony’ (Spivak 1999: 309). Similarly, cautious optimism is
characteristic of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reading of the Indian experience. He links
Eurocentrism with the homogenising logic of capitalism, which functions within
the historicist paradigm of linear development. As a cognitive system, historicism
‘takes its object of investigation to be internally unified, and sees it as something
developing over time’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 23). We are thus dealing with ‘nations’
or ‘cultures’ as homogenous entities which develop progressively by leaving
tradition behind and embracing modernity. Cases that do not fit this model are
accounted for by introducing ‘culture’ as an intervening variable, but in the final
analysis this always leads to Orientalisation: the only way to fit them into the
historicist worldview is by presenting them as both backward and exotic (cf. Young
2004).
Central to Chakrabarty’s political ontology, however, is the element which
cannot be assimilated into the historicist paradigm: it is the figure of the peasant,
which indicates the presence of the ‘antihistorical devices of memory’
(Chakrabarty 2000: 40 et passim). Very much like with Spivak’s subaltern, the
peasant’s consciousness cannot be accessed directly by the Eurocentric discourse.
However, it can be represented politically; according to Chakrabarty, by
introducing universal suffrage immediately after independence, India moved
beyond the Eurocentric image of the peasant as ‘not yet’ ready for self-governance
(ibid.: 9). The fact that the peasant can operate politically is, for Chakrabarty, the
key indication that Europe can be provincialised and the hegemony of Eurocentric
monologism subverted by foregrounding concrete experiences that are routinely
silenced within the existing world order (cf. Epstein 2014). Yet, Chakrabarty
certainly recognises the limitations of his project, at least as long as one’s subject
position remains inscribed within the global academe, ‘whose knowledge protocols
will always take us back to the terrain where all contours follow that of my
hyperreal Europe’. The primary mission of the intellectual is to expose one’s
Eurocentric self: ‘I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very
structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices’
(Chakrabarty 2000: 45).
This observation is echoed by Spivak, who warns that ‘the liberal multiculturalist
metropolitan academy’ is equally complicit in speaking for the subaltern: ‘The
postcolonial migrant investigator is touched by the colonial social formations’
(Spivak 1999: 309). Our critique of the South American decolonial project takes
this observation as a starting point and generalises it beyond the academe as an
institution. We argue that the image of the native, constructed by the discourse of
buen vivir, is yet another contour that follows Chakrabarty’s ‘hyperreal Europe’ —
in other words, it speaks in the name of an imagined peasant instead of seeking to
empower real subalterns and, as such, is, at least in potentia, repressive. In its
formal parameters, in spite of having originated from the leftist discourse, it comes
9
dangerously close to the conservative propaganda of the Russian government,

which also opposes the authenticity of tradition to moral insolvency of modern
society. Both in effect construct the native as a noble savage of European
Orientalism.
To repeat, we see the failure of the South American indigenistas as occurring at
the level of theory rather than implementation: they make a fatal mistake not in
how they imagine the native, but by embarking on this project in the first place. To
prove this and to point towards a way out of this predicament, one needs to go
beyond the limits of postcolonial critique, while still staying on the ground of post-
Marxist theorising. Here, both Chakrabarty and Spivak provide the essential
connecting points.
The native and the worker

Chakrabarty’s search for the peasant is grounded in a post-Marxist reformulation of
Homi Bhabha’s notion of the colonial encounter (Bhabha 1994). Whereas the latter
conceives difference in purely cultural terms, the former brings forward the
connection between colonialism and capitalism. The main protagonists of the
colonial encounter are thus capital and the universe of pre-modern memories,
which is ‘larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical
presuppositions of capital’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 64). Capital exerts powerful
homogenising pressure, assimilating its antecedents, but nevertheless the ontolog-
ical excess of anti-historical memories is always there, manifesting itself in
grassroots anticolonial resistance. However, the reassessment of the Enlightenment
and its historicist paradigm, carried out both within and outside Europe in the
course of the twentieth century (Young 2004: 32–52), makes clear that we cannot
reach out directly to this world from within the Eurocentric emancipatory
discourse. A political strategy based on imagining the native on the basis of pre-
given categories, be it class, race or something else, is bound to fail.
While Chakrabarty draws directly on Marx, Spivak’s definition of the subaltern
is rooted in the legacy of Antonio Gramsci, who coined the term in his Prison
Notebooks. In Gramsci’s writings, all essential elements of this concept are already
present: the subaltern is defined as disenfranchised, having ‘insufficient access to
modes of representation’ (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar 2006: 359), the one whose
agency is limited by the existing social order — ‘a structured place from which the
capacity to access power is radically obstructed’ (Morris 2010: 8).
We argue that a more systematic engagement with Gramsci could significantly
enhance our understanding of the peripheral attempts to recover authentic legacies
in order to use them as the basis for the opposition to neoliberal hegemony. What
Gramsci makes particularly clear is that the development of productive forces does
not lead to an automatic adjustment at the level of superstructure. In the course of a
10
detailed study of Italian history, he comes to the conclusion that a range of factors,
such as external intervention, uneven development of capitalism and the inability of
the progressive classes to become conscious about their historical role, can
perpetuate a reactionary hegemonic order. Despite the fact that a reactionary
hegemony stifles national development, it can nevertheless exist for long historical
periods, especially in the peripheral countries where the impact of uneven
development and geopolitical competition is particularly severe. Italy, for instance,
had not been able to overcome its relative backwardness and ended up transitioning
from the uncompleted revolution of the Risorgimento to a fascist dictatorship.
Decolonial critique of capitalism and Eurocentrism firmly opposes the idea that
historical progress unfolds everywhere through essentially the same stages, and
consequently does not associate universal emancipation with the workers.
However, as we demonstrate below, there is an important analogy between the
notion of the fundamental class and the figure of the native in the buen vivir
discourse. This analogy is subject to heated debates: it is asserted by some
proponents of nativism who try to reinterpret it in neo-Marxist terms, but
categorically rejected by the mainstream decolonial approach, which insists on the
holistic, undivided and thus classless nature of native thinking (Mignolo
2000, 2009; Yampara 2010; cf. Cadena 2010: 348–350). There are also some
critics who maintain that, by isolating their normative agenda from the workers’
struggle, the champions of buen vivir effectively condemn the native to misery and
oppression (Ferreira 2014).
Our analysis stands out against this entire spectrum in the sense that we refrain
from claiming that the historical circumstances facing both groups are in any way
analogous. Rather, what we are looking at are two currents of political thought that
deduce their definitions of the subject of emancipation from a certain generalised
reading of the historical situation. Traditional Marxists (including Gramsci, whose
thought remains historicist) see peripheral countries as underdeveloped and put
their hopes in the worker; proponents of buen vivir perceive South American
situation as one of incomplete decolonisation and invest their political effort in the
native. In both cases, we are dealing with what Laclau (2005: 184) describes as the
‘movement from name to concept’, whereas the construction of a popular political
subject presupposed an opposite movement — from concept to name. The analogy
thus exists at the level of the structure of the argument rather than specific political
slogans: we do not claim that buen vivir is a Marxist ideology; rather, we highlight
the elements of essentialism present both in the decolonial project and in classical
Marxism.
This is a key point where poststructuralist theory of hegemony parts ways with
both neo-Gramscian International Political Economy and the decolonial project.
This move requires a detailed explication, which will also enable us to outline an
alternative normative agenda.
11
The subaltern does speak

From Laclau’s perspective, attempts to impose abstract concepts (be it ‘funda-
mental class’ or ‘indigeneity’) indicate ‘the dream of access to systematically
closed totality’ of the social (Laclau 2005: 116, see also 154, 184–185). It is an
inevitable consequence of the dualist ontology, which presupposes that ideas and
identities always reflect underlying material reality (even if one accepts that they
are ultimately capable of influencing the latter). In a more explicit form, this view is
presented by Bob Jessop’s claim that the function of hegemony is ‘to bring social
forces and institutions into conformity with the requirements of capitalist
reproduction in a particular period’ (Jessop 2002: 6; see also Cox 1987; Hall
1986; Bieler and Morton 2008).
The decolonial view is perhaps more subtle, but it also tends to position buen
vivir as a way of life in harmony with the historical legacy of the South American
nations, which is likewise presented as ‘material’ in the sense of being organically
intertwined with the nature in a single ‘socionatural world’ (Cadena 2010), rather
than socially constructed. There are also overlaps between the two utopias: as Neil
Davidson (2005: 47–48) points out, some Marxist historians have been unable to
steer clear of the naı̈ve dream ‘of bypassing capitalism for non-exploitative
societies of small commodity producers, possibly in alliance with the indigenous
peoples of the Americas’.
Laclau, for his part, insists on the need to leave the dualist view behind as the
‘last remainder of essentialism’ (Laclau 2005: 127) and to fully embrace the
materialist view that all objectivity is discursive (ibid.: 115). This position leads
him to the emphasis on the political demand as such, as a self-grounded political
move that invokes the universality of ‘the people’. This position is grounded in
Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the authentic, unchangeable truth of the Real
remains forever beyond reach: ‘With the fullness of the primordial mother being a
purely mythical object, there is no achievable jouissance except through radical
investment in an object petit a. This object petit a becomes the primary ontological
category’ (ibid.: 116–117). Similarly, in politics, ‘the fullness of the community’ is
‘that which is denied and, as such, remains unachieved’ (ibid.: 106).
Hence, the people as a political subject cannot be rooted in the materiality of
‘production’, ‘history’ or ‘nature’, because any such materiality presupposes a
society reconciled with itself, which is no more than a fiction. The only foundation
for popular subjectivity is the material force of a demand which the current
institutional order is, for whatever reason, unable to accommodate. The demand
thus remains frustrated and, as such, can be related, through a chain of
equivalences, to a potentially unlimited number of other demands which, regardless
of their specific content, share the same essential characteristic of being unfulfilled.
Establishing such an equivalence requires an act of radical investment, which is the
essence of Laclau’s definition of populism: the equivalence can only materialise in
12
a particular identity which, by virtue of becoming an object of such investment,

sheds its own particularity and becomes hegemonic. It becomes an object petit a,
which comes to represent, in the concrete world of politics, the abstract universality
of the people.
A crucial aspect of this logic is the refusal to see the material and the ideational
as ontologically separate. A demand can only become political (i.e. universalisable)
if it is rooted in the material reality of the plebs, of the living and toiling human
beings who constantly face the challenge of physical survival. Yet, to become
politically valid, their concerns have to be articulated within a certain system of
signification, which would relate the materiality of needs to a wider ethical–
political order of the society. Sociologically speaking, this is, of course, a job for
those whom Gramsci describes as ‘organic intellectuals’ — ‘the thinking and
organising element of a particular fundamental social class’ (Hoare and Nowell
Smith 1999: 131). However, if the logic of Gramsci’s analysis is followed through,
the social background of those who perform this function becomes irrelevant: the
discourse, and its political function, takes absolute priority over the position of the
author (or rather the enunciator). Anyone who voices genuine popular demands is
an organic intellectual, but which demand is genuine cannot be known in advance.
Such an inherently political act of speaking signifies the transition from the plebs
to the populus, the constitution of the people as a political subject. It happens at the
point where the material and the ideational become indistinguishable as a matter of
principle: there is no materiality that could be grasped directly, bypassing
representation, and thus all objectivity is discursive. This, however, means that
there is no such thing as an extra-discursive subaltern consciousness. The silent
subaltern simply is not: she comes into being by speaking the language of political
demands.
The Orientalism of buen vivir and the indigenous political subject

One of the foundational elements of buen vivir is the rejection of the binary logic of
the Enlightenment worldview and the promotion of the Andean outlook, where
dualism allegedly does not play such a prominent role. This concerns primarily the
opposition between the natural and the social, but is then expanded to other spheres
and presented as an opportunity for a counter-hegemonic alternative (Cadena 2010;
Gudynas 2011; Villalba 2013). However, the very need for a non-binary alternative
is itself formulated in a binary manner: a new harmonious society is imagined as a
negation of the alienation allegedly brought about by Europeanisation. Even the
most sophisticated accounts, which emphasise ‘hybridity’ and ‘equivocation’ of
indigenous politics as located ‘in more than one and less than two socionatural
worlds’ (Cadena 2010: 353), eventually end up advocating ‘an epistemic
alternative to scientific paradigms’ (ibid.: 349). The promise of overcoming the
13
binary logic of Eurocentrism thus remains unfulfilled. Moreover, it seems that the
promise itself is based on a false logical premise, because it is impossible to
promote a positive agenda without negating that which needs to be overcome (cf.
Prozorov 2011).
Meanwhile, emancipatory rhetoric notwithstanding, the whole discourse unfolds
on a plane created by ‘the liberal multiculturalist metropolitan academy’ (Medina
2011). The practices of buen vivir follow the pattern of twentieth-century
anthropological research (which, in fact, continues to serve as the main source on
the content of indigenous cosmogony). As argued by Orin Starn (1991: 69),
‘[e]thnographic visions of the perennial ‘‘otherness’’ of lo andino had a self-
fulfilling logic. In their desire to study ‘‘indigenous’’ Andean culture, anthropol-
ogists searched out the most ostensibly traditional regions for their research’ and
‘highlighted the most traditional-looking aspects of mountain life’.
The dichotomising logic of Orientalism, opposing indigeneity and Westernisa-
tion, is behind such constructions as ‘Inca socialism’, which Hildebrando Castro
Pozo and José Carlos Mariátegui, among others, presented as the foundation of a
more just postcolonial order. Contemporary anthropologists continue with this
Andeanist tradition by offering a view of the indigenous culture as a radical
alternative to global capitalism (Starn 1991: 67–72). Replacing the romanticist lens
with a Lacanian one, it is easy to recognise this as an example of post-imperial
nostalgia, the longing for the Real that is never there. The vain search for the
fullness of being allegedly accessible through indigenous experiences fails to
achieve the declared aim of understanding the Other better, but rather lays bare the
colonialist Self of a Western (creole) coloniser (Portugal Mollinedo 2011: 72). As
the anthropologist Marcelo Fernandez Osco (an Aymara by origin) puts it, the
search for ‘Indianness’ is conducted in categories formulated by the white
population and the implicit goal remains a mental ‘whitening’ of the natives, their
inclusion into the civilisation created by Western colonisers for Western colonisers
(personal interview by Elena Pavlova, 20 December, 2014).
The Eurocentric, Orientalist character of the buen vivir discourse has not gone
unnoticed by the indigenous intellectuals. The anthropologist Carlos Macusaya
describes it as ‘a discourse of others about ourselves’, a discourse of the wealthy
elite, of those who already live well. On the contrary, if one asks a native about the
meaning of good life, one is likely to hear that it means to live in a nice house and
to have one’s child attend school (personal interview by Elena Pavlova, 11
December, 2014). This is to say, many descendants of the autochthonous
population measure the quality of their life by conventional modern standards
rather than by some primordial value systems.
While the attempts to appropriate the indigenous legacy in a counter-hegemonic
discourse are futile and might be irritating to some of the representatives of the
culture in question, the negative consequences of the institutionalisation of this
attitude in Evo Morales’s project of a plurinational state are more serious.
14
According to Andrew Canessa (2014: 158–159), Morales is trying to create a new

type of relations between the natives and the state, whose impact is not limited to
the indigenous communities: in fact, it creates an entirely new model of citizenship.
The autochthonous native peasant communities now have a constitutional status of
a separate subject of self-determination, which presupposes a new, communitarian
type of democracy (Chivi Vargas 2010).
As a result, ‘Indianness’ is an increasingly popular marker among various groups
and movements, both pro-government and the oppositional ones (Burman 2014).
This, however, does little to address the concerns of other groups, such as the
cocaleros (peasants specialising in cultivating coca, whose identity and outlook
differ significantly from the other native communities), native industrial workers,
urbanised natives, mestizo population and, of course, the Creoles. The boundaries
between all these groups are blurred; the only political identity which suits them all
is ‘Bolivians’. Yet, the plurinational state downgrades this identity, inadvertently
undercutting the legitimacy of Bolivian statehood.
The ‘empowerment of the Other’ happens in the Bolivian case through an
authoritarian, uniform interpretation of the indigeneity that is imposed by the
political elites. It is a typical case of a participatory initiative trapped within neo-
colonial logic (Kapoor 2005). Striving to enhance the position of one group defined
in an abstract way, outside of the real historical situation, it ends up reproducing
historically entrenched racial and class inequalities. For instance, according to the
leader of the Workers League for the Fourth International (a Trotskyite movement),
Javo Ferreira, programmes supporting exclusively the indigenous communities lead
to the impoverishment of the native workers, forcing them to return to their native
communities where their opportunities are much more limited (personal interview
by Elena Pavlova, 9 December, 2014).
It is therefore hardly possible to claim that the policy designed to benefit the
natives as a group reaches its goal unambiguously. Indeed, as Robert Edgerton
(1992) has demonstrated, the image of unspoiled natives living in harmony with
nature and with themselves is a myth which can have dangerous consequences in
the modern context. This view is shared by many South American scholars.
Canessa (2014) maintains that indigeneity is a rather weak anthropological concept,
whose use in political practice solidifies the existing hierarchies instead of
undermining them. Pedro Portugal Mollinedo agrees that ‘the native is still no more
than a toy for the whites’ (personal interview by Elena Pavlova, 9 December,
2014). In Macusaya’s words,
the natives continue to play a folklore, symbolic role […]. [Bolivian Vice-
President Álvaro Garcı́a] Lineira maintains that it is intellectuals and natives
who govern Bolivia. As if natives cannot be intellectuals. […] For me, this mode
of reasoning is colonialism. (personal interview by Elena Pavlova, 11 December,
2014)
15
Thus, there is a widespread discontent in the Bolivian society with the framing of
the Andean culture as a pre-historical one and with the romanticised image of the
native. This discontent, as confirmed by the Bolivian sociologist Ximena Soruco
Sologuren, is shared by the natives and the Creoles alike (personal interview by
Elena Pavlova, 10 December, 2014; see also Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). The real
people, our contemporaries, are reduced to the subject position of the bearer of
some primordial knowledge, whose needs are supposed to be radically different
from those of the ordinary citizens. This artificial figure, indeed, enjoys a privileged
status, but only as long as it remains within the rigid limits imposed on it by the
romanticist decolonial discourse. Crossing those limits means facing even tougher
discrimination, since the privileges offered by the state no longer apply, while the
colonial legacy continues to have its discriminatory impact.
As such, the decolonial project of Morales’ Bolivia is a perfect example of the
movement from name (buen vivir) to concept (the plurinational state). It starts with
the idea of genuine fullness associated with the indigenous life — a fullness which
has allegedly been lost in the course of capitalist development. This fullness, the
Lacanian Real itself, cannot be conceptualised directly, so it is captured in the name
of buen vivir. Having become a policy goal, buen vivir then translates into a
number of institutionalised practices and norms which function as concepts by
classifying citizens into formal categories, each endowed with a particular set of
rights in the context of the plurinational state.
The oppressive character of this movement results from the fact that it creates a
populus on the basis of an imaginary figure (the romanticised native) while
ignoring the plebs, whose existence is too trivial for this project to become a matter
of concern (cf. Laclau 2005: 94). It is thus an anti-democratic project, which blocks
the emergence of a subaltern political subject by claiming to speak on her behalf.
It is certainly possible to argue, as some supporters of buen vivir do, that the
Bolivian government has hijacked the slogans of decolonial approach and used
them to legitimise its own authoritarian capitalist policies (e.g. Gascó and Cúneo
2011; Carvajal 2015). There is evidence that, at least in some cases, grassroots
political demands in South America do get articulated with a reference to ‘other-
than-human beings’ and thus represent a different mode of relating to the world
(Cadena 2010). This objection, however, is valid only up to a point. As long as the
buen vivir project stays true to its mission of translating a pre-existing cultural
legacy to a set of policies, it remains trapped in the logic of movement from name
to concept. The fullness of indigenous being that is opposed to Western binarism
has to be postulated first, before listening to any grassroots demands, and these
demands are inevitably reframed and categorised in accordance with this logic, as
either representing the genuine native or failing to do so. This logic is inherently
authoritarian, so the anti-democratic transformation of Bolivian state policies
hardly comes as a surprise.
16
Equally indicative is the fact that the attempts to implement buen vivir as an
official doctrine in Ecuador under Rafael Correa have hit the same wall. The
government is accused of abusing the indigenous values to gain cheap popularity,
preferring half-measures to serious reforms and seeking to establish authoritarian
control (Fernández et al. 2014; Swampa 2015). All these developments are not that
different from what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013: 14) describes sarcastically as
‘the common navel-gazing attempts at returning to the ancient cultural roots that
have informed some Islamic religious and African nationalist fundamentalisms’.
Thus, the existing evidence strongly suggests that promoting indigenous identities
as a state policy, in a top-down manner, cannot give the subaltern a voice.
The above analysis indicates that, in order to go beyond the dichotomy of
presenting the native as either traditionalist and archaic or essentially good (Cadena
2010: 360), it is not enough to insist, along with Marisol de la Cadena, that ‘nature’
and ‘other-than-human beings’ be recognised as an ontologically separate domain.
In fact, this would be a step in the wrong direction. The relegation of indigeneity to
‘culture’ as an ontologically separate and politically irrelevant realm cannot be
achieved by replacing ‘culture’ with ‘nature’, while continuing to insist on
understanding ‘[p]olitics as a relation of disagreement among worlds’ (Cadena
2010: 346, emphasis added).6 Rather, the emphasis must be on political
representation: the task of indigenous politics is to make sure that the ontological
excess of the native being, currently ignored by the Eurocentric common sense,
gets fully articulated as a claim to political subjectivity. It is about giving political
representation not to ‘other-than-human earth-beings’, such as mountains, but to
the people who believe their lives depend on the relations with such earthly objects
and put forward political demands stemming from those beliefs. Besides, there is
no way for indigenous politics to break out of the exoticised ghetto other than
universalising their demands by linking them with a broad range of others, even if
the latter are framed in seemingly Eurocentric terms of class, gender, race,
sexuality or environmentalism (cf. Cadena 2010: 346). In other words, it requires
moving from concept to name, from concrete demands to empty signifiers such as
‘indigeneity’ or ‘the people’.
Viewed in this light, it is not surprising that the political appeal of the Bolivian
plurinational state, which is founded on the opposite logic, is starting to wane
(Gamboa Rocabado 2010; Laserna 2010). The government might after all be forced
to modify its strategy to better address the needs of ordinary citizens. Another
option is to radicalise the opposition between the indigeneity and Westernisation by
intensifying the antagonism with the external Other — the former colonial powers
and the United States as the embodiment of global capitalism. This latter
alternative is illustrated by the developments in the neighbouring Venezuela
(Pavlova 2013). It is even more intriguing that a very similar scenario seems to
unfold in Russia, a country far away in terms of both geography and history.
17
The Russian peasant as an empty spot

Vladimir Putin’s formal return to the top of Russian political hierarchy in 2012
happened in the wake of a relatively strong urban protest movement against the
rigged parliamentarian elections of December 2011 (Greene 2014). As a reaction to
this and other developments, Putin proclaimed a new, explicitly conservative
course, which stood in sharp contrast with his earlier pragmatic stance.7 In his
December 2012 address to the Federal Assembly, he famously deplored the
shortage of ‘spiritual bonds […] which have always, throughout our history, made
us stronger and more powerful, which we have been always proud of’ (Putin 2012).
The current nationalist and conservative turn in Russian politics postulates a
substantial difference between Western and non-Western values and takes it to the
point of denying Russia’s belonging to Europe. Declarations to that effect have
been issued, most notoriously, by the Ministry of Culture (Izvestia 2014) and
Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov (Yeliseev 2013). Instead, Russia is positioned
in the centre of the ‘Russian world’ — an imaginary spiritual and political
community of all ethnic Russians regardless of their place of residence. The
concept has existed since 1990s, but acquired pivotal significance for Russian
foreign policy with the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in Eastern
Ukraine. As Marlene Laruelle points out, by declaring that ‘the Russian nation
became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, ethnic groups in the world to be
divided by borders’ (Putin 2014), the Kremlin ‘officially recognizes the gap
between Russia’s territorial body and its ‘‘cultural body’’, that is, its self-
representation as a nation’ (Laruelle 2015: 95).
The ‘cultural body’ of the nation is conceived of in organic terms, as a being that
is alive in both physical and spiritual terms. As any living organism, it is in constant
danger: the recently updated National Security Doctrine lists ‘the erosion of the
traditional Russian spiritual and moral values […] by way of external cultural and
informational expansion’ among major threats to Russia’s security (RG 2015). In
practical terms, apart from the promise to protect the interests of the ‘compatriots’
living abroad (Putin 2015), this vision gives rise to all sorts of domestic policies
aimed at supporting traditional family and religion, stimulating childbirth,
promoting ‘patriotic’ culture and historiography, and so on (Sharafutdinova
2014; Morozov 2015: 111–115; Rapoport 2015; Stella and Nartova 2016).
We are thus dealing, once again, with a discursive construction of the fullness of
being, which is allegedly undermined by Westernisation but can be accessed
through an exercise in political pedagogy. In a retrospective, Putinite conservatism
is certainly not a new phenomenon: it is yet another manifestation of the
Romanticist discourse, whose controversy with the Westernisers marked the
emergence of the Russian public space in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. It would not, however, be entirely correct to trace Putinism back to such
Slavophile authors as Aleksey Khomiakov and Ivan Kireyevsky, with their
18
democratic predisposition, or to the latter emancipatory ideologies such as

populism (narodnichestvo) and Leo Tolstoy’s nativist anarchism. Rather, it was the
official nationality doctrine, put forward by Sergey Uvarov, Minister of Education
under Nicholas I, which was the earliest clearly articulated precursor of Putin’s
‘spiritual bonds’. Emphasising autocracy, along with Orthodox religion and
nationality (narodnost’), Uvarov’s triad presented the monarchy as the true
embodiment of the popular spirit and the only force capable of protecting the
people from moral decay associated with Western expansionism (see Riasanovsky
1959; Neumann 1996: 24–27).
Their important differences notwithstanding, both the democratic and the official
anti-Westernism exhibit the longing for authentic being, from which the modern
society has allegedly estranged itself, but which nevertheless remains there to be
recovered. In its fixation on the hegemonic Western Other, this view reflects
Russia’s standing in the Eurocentric international society as a subaltern empire.
With the Russian state performing the role of the coloniser on behalf of the
capitalist core (Morozov 2015), the Europeanised elites were, and continue to be,
alienated from the people, but simultaneously attracted to the romanticised image
of the native (Etkind 2002; Uffelmann 2012). This is how the myth about the
‘mysterious Russian soul’ came about, the myth which is shared today by the
educated masses who cannot help engaging in self-Orientalisation — in a manner
almost indistinguishable from South American Creoles’ longing for buen vivir.
Upon a closer look, however, it turns out that this imaginary fullness is based on
pure negation: the ‘traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’, which the state
is supposed to promote, are described in very general terms (see RG 2015, p. 78).
As a matter of practical policies, they are defined in opposition to a certain set of
stereotypes about ‘Western values’. Veteran opposition politician Grigory Yavlin-
sky (2014) describes this logic in the following way: ‘if torture is inadmissible in
European political life, […] we allow it. If on the European pole following the law
is absolutely compulsory, we will act by our own laws. […] It is all built on
negation’. Negativity, in turn, triggers a set of repressive measures against the
internal Other.8 Support for traditional family translates into proposals (some of
them already adopted as laws) to prohibit ‘propaganda of homosexualism’, ban
adoptions by foreigners and by same-sex families, restrict abortion, limit the rights
of childless women and increase the state fee for divorce. Respect for religion
means introducing criminal punishment for ‘offending religious feelings’, while
reverence for the sacrifice of those who fought in World War II turns into legal
measures against ‘falsifications of history’. Promotion of the Russian language and
culture implies, apart from restricting the distribution of ‘subversive’ films,
repression against any contemporary artistic trends that irritate the undemanding
mass consumer (see Bai 2015 for a useful overview).
This trend culminated in President Putin (2014) disparaging the domestic
opponents of the annexation of Crimea and, by extension, all critics of the regime
19
as ‘a fifth column, this disparate bunch of ‘‘national traitors’’’. The label of ‘the
fifth column’ lumps together indiscriminately all ‘freaks’, from the Pussy Riot punk
band to NGOs defending human rights to scholars using funding from abroad. They
are all believed to be agents of the West whose main goal is to shatter Russian
traditional values. Yet, these values as such keep receding in the background, with
the centre stage being occupied by the epic fight against the forces of evil. As
acknowledged, with dismay, by the prominent Russian poet Timur Kibirov (2015),
‘there is no idea behind this — even a phantasmal, escheated like the one that the
communists used to have. None. Bad, good, ghastly, devilish. No ideology. […]
[Just s]tupidity and arrogance’.
Hence, the Russia which is being constructed in the Putinite discourse is not
connected with any living memories outside of the space of the mimetic. The need
to return to the mythical homeland (one of the perpetual themes in the Russian
culture, cf. Condee 2009: 31–34) is postulated in an abstract way, through such
signifiers as ‘spirituality’ and ‘patriotism’, as well as by the allegations that the
government’s conservative policies enjoy a wide popular support. The Russian
people, in the meantime, remain a true subaltern in Spivak’s sense, with their
concerns and demands having absolutely no representation in the public space
(Morozov 2015: 135–165).
As in the South American decolonial discourse, the Russian native is nothing
more than a mirror image of the West, unrelated to any genuine being ‘out there’.
The conservative part of the educated elites constructs its own identity as ‘patriots’
by imagining ‘the genuine Russian’ as a patriarchal savage who is naturally
inclined to healthy patriotism, but can be easily seduced if left without supervision.
What is remarkable is that the image of the native as the bearer of traditionalist
values to a no lesser degree dominates the liberal discourse, where the peasant is
denounced as a barbarian standing in the way of Russia’s modernisation: ‘It is not
about peasants as persons, but about slouching and sultry countryside outlook,
which in many cases has moved to the cities’ (Dragunsky 2015).
To recap, the Kremlin’s defence of ‘traditional values’ is in effect nothing more
than Eurocentrism in reverse: it asserts authenticity by negating everything which is
affirmed by the Orientalist myth. In a way structurally analogous to the Kemalist
hegemony in Turkey, as analysed by Laclau (2005: 212), the ‘homogenization of
the ‘‘nation’’ proceeded not through the construction of equivalential chains
between actual democratic demands, but through authoritarian imposition’. As we
demonstrated above, similar concerns about the top-down promotion of the
indigenous identity are expressed by the critics of the buen vivir discourse. This
analogy is far from superficial. In all these cases, we are dealing with the movement
from name to concept: the tradition invented with the introduction of names like
‘spiritual bonds’ or buen vivir gives rise to prohibitions and entitlements that affect
the lives of real people, sometimes in an entirely arbitrary way. The people, in the
20
meantime, have no independent voice: they are being spoken for, and the plebs thus
never gets a chance to become a populus.
Conclusion
Our comparison of South American buen vivir and Russian search for ‘spiritual
bonds’ highlights a number of similarities which are rather remarkable, given how
far apart the two projects seem to be in ideological terms, as well as geographically
and historically. Both take as their point of departure the idea of the fullness of
being that is associated with the indigenous culture. Both claim that this fullness is
lost as a result of colonisation (which in the Russian case took the form of cultural
Europeanisation rather than political subjection to any of the Western powers). This
perceived loss is conditioned by both countries’ subordinate status in the
Eurocentric imperial order: Bolivia was colonised, whereas Russia developed as
a subaltern empire. Both seek to reclaim the lost fullness by promoting a certain
institutional setup aimed at endowing native cultural practices with a special legal
standing.
The key difference consists in the fact that the Bolivian buen vivir claims to
defend the interests of the really existing indigenous population, while the
discursive figure of the Russian peasant refers to an empty spot at the Eurocentric
core of the Russian national identity. However, this difference must not be
overplayed. Firstly, the Bolivian discourse of indigeneity is plagued by Orientalism
to a no lesser degree than the Russian one. Secondly, and most importantly, in both
cases, indigeneity is constructed in a top-down manner, from name to concept. The
populus that is being feigned in this authoritarian gesture is almost completely
alienated from the plebs. The subaltern is never able to speak through the structures
created to promote indigenous values: contrary to the declared aims, she is silenced
and faces even greater oppression.
A genuine alternative, capable of bringing about emancipation, would consist in
reversing the direction of the move and addressing the needs of the toiling plebs.
This would imply a bottom-up logic of going from concept to name: the popular
demands need to be articulated first, in a language rooted in everyday experience
(and thus fully deploying its referential function). If the institutional setup of the
existing political order is unable to accommodate these demands, time will come
for Laclau’s populist politics. There will be a need for a force capable of
establishing equivalence between heterogeneous demands and consolidating them
around a name — an empty signifier which, through the operation of hegemony,
expresses the universality of the people.
Under the current circumstances, it seems that Bolivia might have a slightly
better chance, compared to Russia, to transform its politics in a radically
democratic way. However, this assessment goes beyond the scope of this paper.
21
What is essential to highlight, as our main empirical conclusion, is that both buen
vivir and ‘spiritual bonds’ as political forms are inherently authoritarian and
Orientalist and, therefore, neither should be accepted uncritically as a manifestation
of indigenous politics.
Our key theoretical finding is that there is no way of knowing anything about the
existence of the subaltern until she speaks up. This is a crucial lesson that one
draws from reinterpreting postcolonial critique in neo-Gramscian terms: while both
Spivak and Chakrabarty assume the subaltern is there but might be spoken for,
Laclau’s radical materialism forces one to question this assumption. As we have
seen from our analysis of Bolivian politics, the natives often resent being framed as
such by the hegemonic discourses, or, as in the Russian case, they are simply not
there. Therefore, popular subjectivity can only emerge in a bottom-up manner, as
an aggregation of localised demands that are grounded in nothing else than the pure
materiality of subaltern existence. The subaltern comes into being by speaking the
language of political demands.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research personal research Grant
PUT260 and institutional research funding IUT20–39. The authors would like to thank Eduardo
Gudynas, Rickard Lalander and JIRD’s anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions, as
well as all our interviewees for their time and insight.
Notes
1 While the attribution of this myth to Rousseau has been disputed compellingly, it remains influential
both in the academe and among the general public (see Ellingson 2001).
2 Admittedly, some versions of buen vivir are presented as modern, post-modern or ‘trans-modern’
(Hidalgo-Capitán and Cubillo-Guevara 2014), but the silencing remains in effect as long the figure of
the native is romanticised.
3 In the Bolivian context, the Spanish-language equivalent would be vivir bien, and both are used as
referring to the indigenous concepts of Sumak Kawsay (Quechua) and Suma Qamaña (Aymara, see
Villalba 2013: 1429–1430). Since terminological niceties have little bearing on our argument, we
stick to the term buen vivir as an established convention in the English-language literature.
4 See, for example, Vargas Mendes (2015) and other texts published by the group Movimiento
Indianista Katarista (MINKA), as well as the Pukara newspaper.
5 For a detailed overview of Gramsci’s thought on the Italian question, see Morton (2007: 51–108) and
Rosengarten (2009).
6 Cadena repeatedly refers to Rancière (1999), but misinterprets him as suggesting ontological
incommensurability between different ‘worlds’ entering in a political relationship. In fact, Rancière’s
position is premised on radical ontological immanence. He views politics not as relations between
pre-existing worlds, but rather as an articulation, within the world of politics, of that which has so far
22
remained speechless, ‘a part of no part’. In this respect, his position is very close to that of Laclau (see
also Laclau 2005: 244–249).
7 While as late as 2011 it was common to refer to Putin’s regime as ‘post-ideological’ (Krastev 2011:
8), the events from 2012 on signified a quick transition from ‘sovereign democracy to sovereign
morality’ (Sharafutdinova 2014).
8 For an excellent analysis of the logic of threat construction in Putin’s Russia, see Snetkov (2015).
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Interviews conducted by Elena Pavlova in La Paz and Cochabamba in

December 2014
1. Orlando Alandia, artist, 16 December

2. Rocio Bustamante, environmental NGO activist,16 December
3. Pablo Ezedin Alarcon Prado, diplomat, 11 December
4. Marcelo Fernandez Osco, sociologist, 20 December
5. Javo Ferreira, leader of the Workers League for the Fourth International, 9 and 11 December
6. Carlos Macusaya, anthropologist, 11 December
7. Fernando Mayorga, political scientist, 15 December
8. Nicolas Melendres, Master student in political science, 12 December
9. Pedro Portugal Mollinedo, historian, 9 December
10. Oscar Oliveira, public figure, 17 December
11. Lorgio Orellana, political scientist, 12 December
12. Jorje Paida, former public servant, PhD student, 10 December
13. Carlos Deric Salazar, professor of law, 18 December
14. Ximena Soruco Sologuren, sociologist, 10 December
15. Vivian Schwarz, sociologist, 15 December
About the Authors
Viatcheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu.

He has published extensively on Russian national identity and foreign policy. More
recently, his research has focused on Russian subaltern imperialism in comparative
context. He is the author of Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a
Eurocentric World (Palgrave 2015) and the editor of Decentring the West: The Idea
of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony (Ashgate 2013).
28
Elena Pavlova is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Government and Politics of

the University of Tartu. Her research interests include contemporary political
philosophy, theory or international relations and Latin American politics. Her
articles have appeared in Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Perspectives
on European Politics and Society, Russia in Global Affairs and Latinskaya
Amerika.

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Indigeneity and subaltern subjectivity

in decolonial discourses: a comparative

Keywords: Bolivia; indigeneity; postcolonial theory; Russia; subalternity; subjectivity

Introduction: in search of a native

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2016 www.palgrave.com/journals

overview, see Maldonado-Torres 2011). As argued by Walter Mignolo (2007: 452),

The subaltern, the peasant or the political subject?

Speaking for the subaltern

voting, in particular, are ‘indeed the symbolic circuit of the mobilizing of

dangerously close to the conservative propaganda of the Russian government,

The native and the worker

The subaltern does speak

a particular identity which, by virtue of becoming an object of such investment,

The Orientalism of buen vivir and the indigenous political subject

According to Andrew Canessa (2014: 158–159), Morales is trying to create a new

The Russian peasant as an empty spot

democratic predisposition, or to the latter emancipatory ideologies such as

Dragunsky, Denis (2015) ‘Krestyanin torzhestvuet [The Peasant is Triumphant]’, Gazeta.Ru, 7

Interviews conducted by Elena Pavlova in La Paz and Cochabamba in

1. Orlando Alandia, artist, 16 December

About the Authors

Viatcheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu.

Elena Pavlova is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Government and Politics of

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