In April of 2026, the government of Rodrigo Paz Pereira —inaugurated on November 8, 2025— promulgated Law 1720, which sought to dismantle the constitutional protection of small peasant property in order to favor extractivist large landholdings (latifundio). That law was the spark of an insurrectionary process that, since then, has triggered the deployment of road blockades, an indigenous march from Pando to La Paz, a massive cabildo (popular assembly) in El Alto that shattered any pretense of dialogue with the Executive, and a women's hunger strike picket.
To account for this crisis, this analysis combines two theoretical traditions. From Nicos Poulantzas, we retrieve the concepts of the power bloc, hegemon fraction, and the relative autonomy of the State, which allow us to examine the tensions between the agro-industrial bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz (the axis of the government), the financial fraction, and the commercial fraction, as well as the role of the State as the political organizer of this contradictory unity. For Poulantzas, the State is the form in which the class struggle is institutionalized; that is, the place where class relations —diffuse and transversal to the entire social formation— materialize without losing their contradictory character, containing them. This is projected into what liberal political science condemns as "polarization," when in reality it is simply the class struggle processing itself within the State. Demanding that actors "avoid radicalizing their positions" without resolving the contradictions that provoke them is a call to resignation disguised as demobilizing moderation. From Zavaleta Mercado, we recover the notion of the motley society (sociedad abigarrada) —an archipelago of temporalities and subjectivities that capitalism has failed to homogenize— and the warning regarding the replacement dispute between fractions, the mechanism through which one bourgeois fraction succeeds another —"a replacement dispute among the lineages of their masters"— as if it were liberation, without transforming capitalist relations of production. The analysis asks whether the mobilizations of 2026 have already produced the germs of a dual power (neighborhood assemblies, cabildos, union coordinating committees) and whether the absence of its own unique, unified political leadership will ultimately channel this insurrectionary energy into a new rotation of bourgeois fractions —Tuto Quiroga, Jaime Dunn, or another— thereby co-opting the potency of the masses.
The article is organized into six sections. First, it reconstructs the sequence of the insurrectionary process from November of 2025 to June of 2026, emphasizing the anti-popular measures (the elimination of the Tax on Great Fortunes, the return of the DEA, Supreme Decree 5503, Law 1720) and the social responses. Second, it characterizes the Bolivian social formation as a motley society, introducing the seigniorial paradox. Third, it analyzes the multiple "Bolivias" in motion, distinguishing the indigenous Amazonian and Andean Bolivia from the Bolivia of agribusiness, while pointing out the internal differentiations within El Alto. Fourth, it explains the implosion of the MAS (Movement for Socialism) and the electoral triumph of the PDC (Christian Democratic Party) by default (vacío), highlighting the role of Vice President Edman Lara as an "ideological prosthesis." Fifth, it examines the power bloc in the light of Poulantzas, showing that no single fraction achieves full hegemony, which forces the government to resort to coercion (State of Exception) once its ideological resources are exhausted. Finally, it addresses whether the conditions exist for a revolutionary situation, co-optation, or a new popular power.
Sequence of the Insurrectionary Process
Following Zavaleta, a motley society becomes legible only in moments of great agitation and the rupture of routine. The unfolding insurrectionary process that has been developing in the country since April of 2026 appears to be one of those moments; hence, it is necessary to review its sequence.
In November of 2025, Rodrigo Paz Pereira was inaugurated. This was followed by three measures that demonstrated the class orientation of the new government: the elimination of the Tax on Great Fortunes, and the return of the DEA. On December 17, Supreme Decree 5503 was promulgated—a comprehensive package of economic measures that eliminated hydrocarbon subsidies, froze public salaries, abolished taxes, and granted facilities for large investments in natural resources under the pretext of a "national economic emergency." Added to this was the reduction of ministries under the guise of fiscal austerity, the absorption of the INRA (National Agrarian Reform Institute) by the Vice-Ministry of Autonomies, and Supreme Decree 5604, which restructured the Ministry of Labor, Employment, and Social Security, fusing its two vice-ministries into one. The government presented it as a measure to "eliminate bureaucracy in procedures and paperwork in the 'Obstacle State' (Estado Tranca)," but it provoked a strong union backlash. Already in 2026, multiple bills were introduced to criminalize road blockades, but none reached approval. On April 10, Law 1720 was promulgated, whose aim was to dismantle the constitutional protection of small property, forcing its integration into the market as an embargable financial asset, and thus favoring extractivist large landholdings. Social unrest grew in parallel with a chronic shortage of hydrocarbons and their dismal quality, which caused costly damages, provoking a strike of ten thousand drivers, in addition to the crisis concerning the Series B banknotes following the plane crash in El Alto, and the logistical failure of the PEPE bond. It is in April when the mobilizations exploded: indigenous Amazonian and Andean Bolivia reactivated their own forms of territorial struggle, a march departed from Pando toward La Paz, and El Alto began to close off the access routes to the city.
By the beginning of May, the march from Pando reached La Paz, the seat of government, after twenty-eight days of walking. The country progressively registered multiple blocked highway points, with daily losses estimated in millions of dollars, while a hunger strike picket of women and the vigil of Amazonian communities deepened the pressure. On Sunday the 26th, Law 1341, which regulated states of exception and limited the use of lethal weapons against the civilian population, was repealed; the Civic Committee demanded a state of exception. On Tuesday, June 2, a massive cabildo in El Alto, which brought together neighborhood councils, the COB (Bolivian Workers' Center), peasants, miners, teachers, transport workers, parents' associations, retail vendors (gremiales), and factory workers, resolved to break off dialogue with the Executive, accuse the co-opted leaders, and submit only to the rank and file. The government claimed to seek negotiated solutions and promised to exhaust all channels of dialogue; a mediation table with parliamentary caucuses was convened at the Vice Presidency, and the decision to call for dialogue and address demands was ratified. However, arbitrary detentions, which began that very day with the neighborhood leader from El Alto, Justino Apaza, provoked further uncertainty and distrust. Amid an acute shortage of food, endless lines, price gouging, and a lack of basic supplies in health centers, on June 3 the president published a video calling on the population to clear blockades using the Armed Forces; minutes later, it was deleted, with production errors cited as the reason. On June 4, the Chamber of Senators approved the State of Exception Bill in general, and it is pending treatment in the Chamber of Deputies at the time of writing this analysis.
The Bolivian Social Formation
This category constitutes Zavaleta Mercado’s most original epistemological contribution and articulates directly with the problem Marx posed in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy regarding the historical conditions under which modes of production articulate, succeed, or coexist. A motley society is conceived as an "archipelago" of micro-universes, temporalities, and subjectivities that capitalism has not succeeded in homogenizing. It is only in moments of great agitation and the rupture of routine when all elements of society are forced into a sudden and centralized synthesis, finally allowing us to comprehend the country’s true reality and how its diverse parts connect.
The structure of this formation explains the existence of an apparent State (Estado aparente), which usually operates with a relative autonomy limited by its subjection to the "super-state" of the dominant fractions. Historically, this has allowed the state apparatus to act in favor of reproducing the total capitalist order, even when this implies tactical contradictions with sectors of the bourgeoisie itself.
This condition of fragmentation is aggravated by the "seigniorial paradox" of the power bloc which, while participating actively in the world market, maintains pre-capitalist cultural patterns and is incapable of constructing an organic national-popular project.
That structural incapacity —the seigniorial paradox— is the reason why the dominant bloc cannot present its project as national. And it is also the reason why this burgeoning insurrectionary process exposes this lack.
Under Rodrigo Paz's government, this is expressed when the Executive acts instrumentally to impose severe setbacks in agrarian, environmental, social, and labor matters —in short, a long list of anti-popular measures with the firm intention of complying with the demands and conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It utilized the votes of the working classes captured during the campaign as a mere formality, only to subsequently exercise power by ignoring the popular will and taking refuge in the strategic geopolitical interests of the United States in our territories.
The bourgeois State is a political apparatus that expresses the interests of the dominant fractions while simulating the representation of the popular classes. This is a sign of a chronic crisis of hegemony, with two key historical moments of inflection. First, following the accumulation of deeply unpopular defeats (the Pacific War and the Chaco War) which evidenced systematic exclusions, provoking alliances that materialized into a national-popular identity and constituted a sufficient hegemonic base to defeat the oligarchy in 1952 with the National Revolution. Second, the development of peasant syndicalism, which grew stronger since the 1980s, alongside ethnic-cultural demands crossed by identity as a prelude to the organic crisis of the Bolivian political system. This culminated in the massive mobilizations of the early 2000s with protests, revolts, and insurrections—the Water War, the Gas War—under the leadership of the Coordinadora del Agua (Water Coalition) and the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact) which provided ideological direction to the project and the agenda of the moment: the constituent assembly and nationalization, which conceived the Plurinational State. This cycle of mobilizations made possible the electoral triumph of the MAS-IPSP in 2005 by channeling the vote of all those forces, consolidating its hegemony.
Taking this as a background, the crisis of 2026 has provoked the gestation of an insurrectionary process; we have returned neither to 1952 nor to 2003, but that memory is present. For this reason, it is necessary to identify which "Bolivias" are moving, with what temporalities, what classes or groups of classes, with their respective interests and contradictions —including those that traverse the popular sectors themselves.
The Multiple Bolivias
The Bolivia of Santa Cruz agribusiness found its clearest political representation in the government of Paz. With Law 1720 —recently repealed— the intention was to pave the way for peasant land to lose its protection and enter more forcefully into the market, credit, and mortgages, vastly favoring agro-industrialists; this provoked a march from Pando that advanced and reached La Paz after twenty-eight days of walking. Today, after days of being in the city, the communities remain in vigil within their territories. Although the law was repealed, its underlying aims have not been entirely pacified. Indigenous Amazonian and Andean Bolivia has reactivated its own forms of territorial mobilization.
"The history of Bolivia teaches that organization is the only certainty of the oppressed." (Zavaleta, De Banzer a Guevara Arze: La fuerza de la masa [From Banzer to Guevara Arze: The Force of the Mass], 1979)
El Alto, which was the insurrectionary heart in 2003, plays a relevant role once again today, being the zone where the blockade is most robust, closing off access to La Paz. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that the El Alto of 2026 is not that of 2003. The social transformation during the period of the Movement for Socialism government produced a deep internal differentiation; a bourgeoisie of Aymara origin emerged, and sectors of self-employed workers partially reproduce capitalist relations of production and their contradictions. This differentiation expresses the formation of new class fractions and distinct class positions within what was previously read as a relatively homogeneous popular bloc. This heterogeneity fragments collective identities, multiplies the interests at stake, and complicates the construction of any stable political alliance, explaining why there are voices and resistance to the mobilizations and blockades in this city as deeply reactionary stances.
Now, when organized peasant movements, salaried miners, teachers, interprovincial and urban transport workers, El Alto neighborhood councils, parents' associations, retailers, and factory workers mobilize, blockade, and assemble, we could be seeing the first sparks of a complex process of accumulation of intensity or "pathos," as Zavaleta called it. A social availability occurs when the broad masses lose faith in old beliefs and find themselves in a state of malleability, prepared for the adoption of new collective beliefs and the universal replacement of prior loyalties.
The Implosion of the MAS and the Electoral Triumph of the PDC
The MAS governed Bolivia between 2006 and 2025, first under Evo Morales (2006-2019), and then, following the coup d'état with Áñez (2019-2020), under Luis Arce (2020-2025). That cycle promised the decolonization of the State, sovereignty over natural resources, and the redistribution of gas rents toward the subaltern classes. It partially fulfilled those promises, with significant and widely recognized results, but it also systematically betrayed them.
The MAS was not electorally defeated at the ballot box; it imploded before reaching that stage due to internal contradictions accumulated over years —the war between the factions of Morales and Arce, the progressive loss of its social base derived from the exhaustion of redistribution, corruption scandals that eroded credibility, and the inherent vacuum of reformism that could not break with extractivism or capitalist relations of production, as well as proscription mechanisms that prevented certain factions from running in the elections. This implosion is what generated the political vacuum that Rodrigo Paz was able to exploit.
Jáuregui explains this with complete precision. The general elections of 2025 were competitive, given that multiple political forces had real possibilities of winning. However, the electoral offer was dominated by the traditional elite, and the popular sectors lacked representation, which was expressed in the high number of blank (2.50%) and spoiled (19.87%) votes. It was not the positive vote of popular enthusiasm toward Paz that brought him to power; it was the rejection of the MAS expressed in a context of an electoral offer that did not include a credible popular alternative. Paz did not win through adherence, but through a vacuum. This difference is not semantic; it has structural consequences for the government's weakness and the speed with which the illusion dissipated.
The cycle of the MAS can be read as an attempt to reconfigure the power bloc by incorporating sectors of workers and representatives of the subaltern classes, without altering the capitalist character of the State or the structural foundations of accumulation. It ended, therefore, in the absorption of popular demands by the state apparatus, the systematic co-optation of leaders, and the neutralization of the organizational autonomy of the movements. There is a Marxist-Leninist thesis of general scope demonstrated here —once again— that reformist or social-democratic governments that do not break with capitalism end up favoring the interests of the bourgeoisie —whether agro-industrial or financial— because the structure of the capitalist State reproduces that orientation independently of the subjective intentions of its occupants.
The electoral defeat of the popular cycle is not sufficient to guarantee the reproduction of the capitalist order; for that, it is required that the adjustment be presented as a technical inevitability, that the law favoring agribusiness appear as agrarian modernization, and that the return of the DEA be sold as democratic sovereignty and the fight against drug trafficking. That function of ideological replacement is met by the ideological state apparatuses, in the Althusserian sense that Poulantzas incorporates into his analysis. The question then is not only which fraction of the bloc dominates, but how that domination is naturalized, what language it uses, and what institutions reproduce it. The PDC has a very precise answer to that question, and it is worth reading it closely before the insurrectionary process dismantles it in the streets.
The Power Bloc, Contradictory Unity, and the Crisis of Hegemony
Why was a government with a parliamentary majority, with the state apparatus in its hands, and with the explicit support of US imperialism, unable to deactivate the blockades or respond to the demands of the mobilization?
A crucial point that I am interested in deepening to answer this question is the technical distinction between economic domination and political hegemony. Poulantzas demonstrates that hegemony is a political category that does not mechanically depend on primacy in production. The hegemon fraction is that which, through the mediation of the State as a political organizer, manages to deploy two senses of hegemony. It unifies the power bloc internally, constituting its economic interests as political interests, and exercises intellectual and moral leadership over the subaltern classes by presenting its particular objectives as the general interest of the nation as a whole. This double function is what Poulantzas, following Gramsci, calls hegemony proper.
The stability of this power bloc depends on these functions being concentrated effectively, although the theory admits the possibility of mismatches and displacements between them. In the Bolivian case, the "seigniorial paradox" of the power bloc prevents it from consolidating an organic hegemonic leadership. Faced with the inability to present its interests as national, the dominant bloc usually renounces self-determination to take refuge in coercion or in external systemic imperatives —namely, US geopolitical interests— breaking the unstable equilibrium of compromises necessary for a lasting hegemony.
The stability of the bloc is achieved when a fraction exercises this hegemony in the full sense of the term, in its ability to subordinate both the pretensions of the different fractions and all other classes of society (Poulantzas, 1968). In Bolivia, the crisis is defined precisely by the absence of a hegemon fraction in that full sense; no single fraction of the dominant bloc manages to fulfill both functions simultaneously. This absence produces what Poulantzas —recalling Gramsci— would term an organic crisis, not a crisis of government that is resolved with a cabinet shuffle, but a crisis of the very form of domination.
The power bloc that sustains the PDC government is not monolithic. Its axis is the Santa Cruz agro-industrial bourgeoisie, a fraction that has accumulated economic, territorial, and ideological power over the last three decades. But the bloc includes other fractions with partially divergent interests: the financial bourgeoisie, linked to domestic banking and the circuits of transnational capital pushing the IMF agenda; the commercial and importing bourgeoisie, which supports trade liberalization but fears the drop in domestic consumption caused by fiscal adjustment; and the remnants of the large landownership in the East (Oriente), whose biological and institutional continuity with the elites of the nineteenth century is not a Zavaletean metaphor but a verifiable sociological fact.
This complex composition of the bloc is expressed in the internal tensions of the cabinet and in parliamentary fractures. Jáuregui describes how the PDC has 16 senators and 49 deputies without an absolute majority, and how the PDC's own bench is split into multiple factions that prevent it from acting cohesively (Jáuregui, 2026). Defections toward the ruling party express, in Poulantzasian terms, the reorganization of alliances between fractions of the dominant bloc; the financial capital of La Paz that backed Paz needs a parliamentary majority that the PDC’s electoral base failed to provide. This fragile and bought majority does not constitute hegemony; it is the simulacrum of political leadership.
The agro-industrial bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz is the economically most powerful fraction of the bloc and the one most directly expressed in the policies of Paz’s government. A clear example is Law 1720; although it was repealed, it was announced that a new law would be drafted in the same direction and with the same intent: the liberalization of exports and environmental flexibilization. Although it is the dominant fraction of the bloc, it is not the hegemon because it fails to achieve the second of the two functions that hegemony demands: presenting its interests to the subaltern classes as the general interests of the nation.
This emerging insurrectionary process is proof of that failure; when there came to exist around 90 blocked road points, when El Alto cuts off access to La Paz, when there is a women’s hunger strike picket and Amazonian communities unite in vigil and rejection of the government, we are facing the practical negation of any hegemonic pretension.
This crisis of hegemony does not remain in the abstract realm of fractions and their divergent interests; it projects itself onto institutions, people, and the concrete devices that the dominant bloc constructs to simulate unity where there is none. If the Santa Cruz agro-industrial fraction cannot present its interests to the popular classes as the general interests of the nation, then it requires an ideological operator to convince, distort, and divert attention from its true intentions in order to go against the interests of the popular classes. That was the campaign role of Edman Lara.
The figure of Vice President Edman Lara fulfilled an ideological function in the political architecture of the power bloc. He operated as a representation of the "popular" that made an otherwise anti-popular class program electorally presentable. His non-oligarchic origin, his identity register, and his media hyper-spectacularization served the function of disguising domination as representation, passing off the particular interest of the dominant fraction as the general interest of the nation.
Jáuregui explains this mechanism with rigor: Rodrigo Paz and Edman Lara managed to catalyze the expectation of change by differentiating themselves from the traditional right, linking economic solutions to the crisis with the aspirational demands of upwardly mobile popular sectors. This operation is exactly what Susan Stokes calls neoliberalism by surprise, the post-electoral turn of governments that adopt neoliberal reforms despite being elected on platforms to the contrary (Stokes, 2001, cited in Jáuregui, 2026). The Paz-Lara ticket required that programmatic ambiguity —"capitalism for everyone, 50/50"— in order not to antagonize the popular electorate.
Once the government aligned itself unambiguously with the interests of agribusiness and the geopolitical interests of US imperialism —the elimination of the Tax on Great Fortunes in November of 2025, Law 1720— that ideological device became dispensable and even disruptive. Lara became an obstacle to the executive’s strategy because his popular legitimacy demanded real, not ornamental, power. When the adjustment becomes visible, when the cost falls on the popular sectors, the mask cannot be maintained; it falls.
The Christian Democratic Mask, the Ideological Apparatuses, and the Anti-National Logic
The category that best explains Paz’s government is the one Zavaleta applied to the liberals of the early twentieth century: linear pragmatism or the theory of association with imperialism. But Poulantzas adds a dimension: the role of the ideological state apparatuses —drawing from Althusser— in the reproduction of consensus. The PDC constructs a discourse in which fiscal adjustment appears as responsible modernization, Law 1720 as agrarian progress, and the return of the DEA as democratic security and the fight against drug trafficking. Jáuregui specifies the mechanism by mentioning that the government has a high discursive capacity, given that a discourse of inevitability has been installed in the media that associates the statist model with embezzlement and corruption, presenting the adjustment as a technical issue of patriotic conviction.
The elimination of the historical fuel subsidy in December of 2025, the reduction of ministries presented as fiscal austerity, and Law 1720 favorable to Santa Cruz agribusiness —which, as it turns out, was drafted during the government of Luis Arce Catacora and reactivated by Marinkovic—: this sequence is the reproduction of the anti-national logic. In Poulantzasian terms, it is the expression of which fraction of the power bloc exercises domination at this moment and what interests the State materially condenses and organizes. US imperialism, which expressed its support for the government, has direct interests in the outcome of the Bolivian conflict —lithium, gas, rare earths, and Bolivia’s geostrategic position— and its support is an intervention in the class struggle in favor of the anti-national fractions of the dominant bloc.
Bolivia is not experiencing a crisis of government, as many claim, which would be resolved with cabinet changes; it is experiencing a long-term organic crisis that began in 2003, was managed but not fully resolved by the MAS cycle, and ecloses now with the conservative restoration of Paz.
The entire architecture analyzed up to this point —the power bloc without a hegemon fraction, the Lara device as an ideological prosthesis, the anti-national logic disguised as patriotic austerity— describes the pole of domination. But the organic crisis can be defined in terms of what Lenin noted: "when 'the lower classes' do not want to live in the old way and 'the upper classes' cannot carry on in the old way." The question is no longer what the dominant bloc does to sustain itself, but whether the objective conditions of a revolutionary situation are given and, above all, whether there exists the subjective condition capable of converting insurrectionary potency into constituted power.
Revolutionary Situation and the Germs of Dual Power
Zavaleta called "social availability" those moments of deep crisis in which the masses are prepared to substitute their old loyalties; the cabildo of June 2 in El Alto is the clear expression of this. This availability coincides with what Lenin defined as the objective symptoms of a revolutionary situation: when "the upper classes" cannot rule as before, the misery of "the lower classes" is aggravated, and the activity of the masses intensifies significantly.
However, Lenin warned that the existence of these objective conditions does not guarantee revolution. For the crisis to lead to a real victory, the subjective factor is indispensable—namely, the capacity of the revolutionary class to carry out mass actions so powerful that they succeed in "shattering" the old government. This requires a conscious vanguard that does not limit itself to following the spontaneity of the movement (tailism/seguidismo), but is capable of directing the insurrectionary energy toward the actual overthrow of the regime and the conquest of political power.
The potency of the spontaneous mobilization of the masses is unquestionable. Neighborhood councils, communities, and miners' unions act with a discipline forged in historical resistance. However, spontaneity, being the embryonic form of consciousness, manifests itself necessarily as trade-unionism, representing the ideological subordination of the workers to the bourgeoisie, limiting their aspirations to improvements within the capitalist system instead of seeking its destruction. Consequently, a struggle centered on corporate demands, although legitimate, tends to remain within the limits of the existing order.
"And anyone who supposes that power can be taken with unions is very mistaken. As long as the working class does not overcome its merely unionist content, it may be a very radical class, but it cannot be a class of power." (Zavaleta, in the interview with Laserna, 1985, p. 556)
Trade-unionism is, in essence, syndicalism—the collective struggle of workers to achieve better working conditions and immediate reforms, but without questioning the social regime as a whole.
In Bolivia, the most concrete risk in this regard is the deviation that "Evismo" may represent, since the mobilization structures of the MAS, which Jáuregui identifies as a potential residual coalition (Jáuregui, 2026), retain territorial roots and recognized leadership, but their project is the restoration of the previous cycle —not its overcoming. Subordinating the mobilizations of 2026 to the logic of Evismo would be a deviation toward tailism, utilizing union energy for a restoration project that maintains traditional canons of domination under a popular appearance; it would mean co-opting insurrectionary potency in favor of a fraction that aspires to reconfigure the dominant bloc to its own advantage.
The co-optation of popular leaders that took place during the MAS period was not a moral anomaly but the expression of a structural trend that Lenin had theorized and Poulantzas deepened: the problem was not only the absence of consciousness but the presence of class power within the popular organization itself. Workers' and peasants' organizations are not pure spaces exempt from capitalist power relations, because they are traversed by them, which explains systematic co-optation and bureaucratization. As Zavaleta indicates, although the union is a democratic space of the masses, it lacks the necessary coherence to take power—a task that demands a conscious scheme that only the party can provide.
In The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, Lenin analyzes the concept of dual power—the situation in which an alternative power to the bourgeois State emerges, with its own organs of deliberation and execution, competing with the existing State for the direction of society. The classic historical example is the soviets of 1917. The question is whether germs of an analogous dual power exist.
The honest answer is that these germs do exist, which is why the peasant movement maintains dominance in the rural sector. The assemblies of neighborhood councils in El Alto that decide on blockades, the peasant cabildos that coordinate the cutting of routes, and the union coordinating committees that articulate the actions of the COB: all these organizational forms function, in moments of greatest intensity, as instances of collective deliberation and decision-making operating parallel to and against the State. They are germs of alternative power. But this insurrectionary process has not yet produced a consolidated dual power; there is no national coordinating body to articulate these germs into a political power with its own program, with the capacity for state interlocution in terms of force, with a horizon beyond the tactical demand for Paz’s resignation. This is the objective limit of the conjuncture. This insurrectionary process has opened up a possibility, and it remains to be decided whether it will be filled by a new popular power or by a new co-optation; that is the political task of the moment.
This analysis sought to traverse the seigniorial paradox as a long-term structure, the power bloc without hegemony, the ideological apparatuses that naturalize the adjustment, the insurrectionary potency of the subaltern classes, and the objective limit represented by the absence of a national coordinating instance. But there are still elements to study. We are left with a question: at what historical moment does Bolivia find itself, what distinguishes it from October of 2003, and what conditions —objective and subjective— will determine whether the conjuncture closes in a new co-optation or in a real rupture with a new popular power?
Conclusion
The insurrectionary process that Bolivia has been living since April of 2026 is the organic crisis of a form of domination that never managed to construct hegemony, lacking the capacity to present the particular interest of the dominant fraction as the general interest of the nation. What is at stake is the viability of a way of exercising power that repeats itself under renewed masks. If the insurrectionary process does not produce its own political direction now and the vacuum is resolved within the rules of the game imposed by liberal democracy, the result will not be transformation but a rotation of bourgeois fractions in power. Tuto Quiroga, at the head of Alianza Libre, is the main political beneficiary of every stumble by Paz’s government, patiently accumulating the electoral capital that the crisis gifts them. The libertarian project of Jaime Dunn waits in the other lane, ready to present the dismantling of the State as a popular solution. If Condori is proscribed, or if any alternative from the popular camp reaches elections fragmented and without a class program, the insurrectionary potency of May of 2026 will have been captured by another bourgeois fraction. A new replacement dispute between lineages, exactly as Zavaleta warned. The ballot boxes without prior popular organization will merely administer the defeat.
The seigniorial paradox causes the structural incapacity of the Bolivian ruling class to convert its class project into a national project—a constant in history; it is incapable of building legitimacy before the popular classes. The government of Paz is a coalition that came to power following the vacuum left by the implosion of the MAS and the proscription or failure of its fragmented expressions; it governed for Santa Cruz agribusiness and the geopolitical interests of US imperialism. Now that the illusion has dissipated, it legislates the suspension of rights to deploy the coercive capacity of the State Apparatus, attempting to shield itself legally because it has already exhausted its resources of governability.
The approval in general and in detail of the State of Exception Bill in the Senate, and its probable ratification by the Chamber of Deputies this Saturday, June 6, is the expression that, as Zavaleta said, traditional parties quickly lose their social base, fail in their legitimizing function, and repression cannot yield to consensus. The State of Exception is the juridical translation of that impotence; it is the moment in which the dominant bloc confesses, before the entire society, that it can only maintain itself by suspending the guarantees it invokes to legitimize itself.
In the blockades, in the cabildos of El Alto, in the Amazonian vigil that does not negotiate, and in the neighborhood assemblies that function as parallel instances of deliberation and territorial command, a mass potency has been deployed that the government can neither co-opt nor crush without destroying the little that remains of its legality. The union coordinating committees that articulate the action of the COB, the road cuts that condition the supply of the capital, the cabildo of June 2 that accuses co-opted leaders and submits only to the rank and file: all of this is already, in its embryonic form, a dual power that has not yet found its instance of national unification. The social availability is given. The substitution of loyalties, which Zavaleta called the constitutive moment of mass politics, is latent. What is lacking is the form that concentrates it, and that is where the danger lies. That is the objective limit of the conjuncture, and also its most acute risk. There does not yet exist a national coordinating instance capable of articulating these dispersed germs into a political power with its own program and horizon. What class, with what historical project, would fill the power vacuum in the event of achieving the president's resignation? The answer to that question is the political task of the moment. It is not something that can be left for later; it is a task for today, in the assemblies of the rank and file, in the union coordinating committees, and in the communities that deliberate on their destiny. Because, as Zavaleta pointed out, the time of nations is not that of generations, but conjunctures close. And class violence, as always, does not rest.
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*Camila Azeñas Uzquiano is a political scientist and member of the Reorganization Committee of the Communist Party of Bolivia.
The views expressed are those of the author.