Abstract
This dialogue offers a Foucauldian critique of Angus McNelly's (2023) Gramscian analysis of passive revolution in Bolivia under Evo Morales. While McNelly's framework rigorously illuminates elite adaptation and the incorporation of social movements into the state, it operates at the top-down level of political structure, foregoing a genealogical analysis of how categories such as "indigenous movement" were produced as legible political actors. Moreover, the spatiotemporal apparatus McNelly deploys — Zavaleta Mercado's sociedad abigarrada and "temporal dissidence" — generates a blind spot within his own framework: it cannot account for formations of Bolivian social life that never synchronised with the homogeneous time of the state. Applying Foucault's governmentality and biopolitics, this dialogue shows that the plurinational state reproduced neoliberal governmental rationality under a new discursive subject, domesticating Bolivia's abigarramiento through constitutional classifications and biopolitical interventions. Resistance is relocated below hegemony, in the economía popular — a formation operating on concrete time that, drawing on Mises' praxeology, constitutes the ontological substrate from which political formations momentarily crystallise and to which they return.
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