The ambiguous charm of community: autonomy, power and transformation conflicts in the Bolivian Andes

Abstract From a decolonial perspective, Latin American indigenous and peasant communities are reservoirs of traditional knowledge, distinct ontologies, “own” economic and social practices and forms of political organization that make them ready-to-go autonomies and sites of resistance to the state, capitalism and modernity. Carter and Albó describe the Bolivian Andean community as a “local republic” or “mini-state”; for others, it offers a foundation for decolonial alternatives, with indigenous autonomies expected to become territories liberated from capitalist logics. In short, they are the best places for transformation initiatives (TI) to flourish from below, beyond state structures and global agencies. This case study-based article summarizes a sociopolitical ethnography of a Quechua-speaking territory in the Cochabamba department. It casts doubt on decolonial assumptions of community-autonomy vs. state/capitalism/modernity and on the autonomist Marxist perspective of state-society relations as conflictual, with autonomy naturally antagonizing state power. I discuss this in relation to local peasant unions, which were formed under the 1953 Agrarian Reform but function as a traditional Andean community. In my hypothesis, by using particular mechanics of communal democracy in organic symbiosis with official state structures (municipality), social organization appropriates the state at the local level, securing political power and territorial control and gaining potent tools for post-neoliberal development transformation that enable and influence the emergence of TI. To what extent does this model enable self-determined projects to emerge? How does this form of autonomy affect relations within the community and what is its impact on TI? This article examines the dynamics of communality and internal power relations, concluding that although the model helps TI emerge, it also provokes serious tensions and conflicts of interest between communal and family/associative initiatives, revealing another side to autonomous communalism.