Renovating the Cosmos and Overturning the Upside-Down: The Ontological Stakes of Bolivia’s Lithium Economy

With reference to Bolivia’s lithium economy, this article addresses a peculiar paradox: How can so many individuals within the industry persist to pledge loyalty to industrializing lithium while at the same time expressing deep frustration with the Morales-Linera regime’s industrialization project? I claim that this contradiction is the result of the complex way lithium development has interacted with the country’ s so-called democratic and cultural revolution. I reveal that the regime has utilized the lithium project as an insurgent tool to consolidate state power in a context where socialist transformation has been conceptualized as a struggle for hegemony. In this setting, the regime validated lithium development by advancing a secular version of the vivir bien paradigm. This provoked ambivalent sentiments among the workers within the lithium industry. Since local actors are able to penetrate hegemonic state discourse with their own ontological stakes, socialist hegemony is not entirely secured in Bolivia.