In praise of plurinational revolutions

The Living Stream

I visited my PhD supervisor, Jeffery Paige, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, six months ago. It had taken several emails to mutual friends before I found his address. He had recently moved into an assisted care home.

I hadn’t been in touch with him for over fifteen years -- since the completion of my dissertation work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor -- but it felt like old times, despite a recent stroke that had paralysed his right arm and slowed his speech somewhat. He is single and his siblings live in far-off cities. It was comforting to hear that he was being well cared-for at the care home. He had, he assured me, come to terms with his physical condition. He got to watch a high-quality film in a spacious TV room daily and skilled readers read out to him from serious literary works and The New York Times a couple of times a week. His mind was still super sharp.

Jeff asked if my doctoral thesis had become a book. The thesis tracked the idea of development in colonial India and its influence on economic activities in Old Mysore. He had seen it take shape over a nine-year period. It should be out soon, I replied apologetically, and tried to convey that I had inexplicably prioritised other writing tasks over this one.

During a chance stop-over in Cambridge last week, I dropped in on Jeff again.

His suite was as bright, clean and orderly as the previous time. I asked him for his reading of the election trend in the US. “It’s close,” he replied straightaway. Ever the concerned observer of US democracy, his anxiety about a possible Trump win was apparent. After selling his house in Ann Arbor, he was now registered as a voter in Massachusetts. “I wish I had my vote in Michigan.” Among the few major swing states, Michigan is more decisive for the US presidential election result than Massachusetts. He, like other democratically-minded people, was baffled at the support for a demagogue like Trump.

The conversation wheeled freely. While watching Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) the previous night, he had been struck that Bodley Bay, where the film was shot, was “exactly” how he had found it two decades later. I suggested he consider writing a memoir. “It would be valuable,” I added, “to have an insider’s account of American sociology since your student days. You could dictate it. The voice conversion software can transcribe it.” He didn’t seem persuaded.

The conversation then turned to his last book, Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005 (2020). Nearly five centuries after the Spanish conquest, individuals from indigenous communities of Ecuador and Bolivia had finally become heads of their countries through elections in 2002 and 2005 and ushered in a wholly new political culture. Indigenous Revolution seeks to understand these momentous episodes through interviews with over 20 influential leaders from the Aymara, Kichwa, Quechua, Shuar and other indigenous communities of these countries.

This book forms part of a trilogy. Agrarian Revolution (1975), a classic in political sociology which won him the Sorokin Award, the highest honour in US sociology, in his mid-thirties, compared Peru, Angola and Vietnam to theorise the conditions that let small farmers organise themselves and acquire political power on their own. His second book, Coffee and Power (1997) explained why the coffee elite supported authoritarian rule in El Salvador, revolutionary socialism in Nicaragua, and social democracy in Costa Rica, and how all these different polities transitioned towards representative democracy and neo-liberal economic policies in the nineties.

In Indigenous Revolution, he moves away from his earlier view of a revolution as a radical upturning of the political and economic order to celebrate the triumph of local notions of the human being and their integral relations with nature in Ecuador and Bolivia through elections. Referring to the subjects of his three books, his preface notes: “One thing was constant in the three revolutionary situations -- my country, the United States of America, always stood against the poor farmers in revolt.”

The constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia have renamed these countries as plurinational states. ‘Plurinational’ acknowledges that multiple indigenous communities exist within the country, each with distinct worldviews and in need of territorial autonomy and rights to survive and flourish in the future. The pressure from rich foreign countries and private corporations on water, forests, land and mineral resources is constant and deadly. Whatever turn such politics might take, Jeff’s book shows, the neoliberal ideas of a privatised market and minimal government have been decisively countered by “a cosmovision” that upholds a sacred relationship between humans and nature.