September 2025
Michael Hardt is a professor at Duke University. He has co-authored four books with Antonio Negri including Empire and Multitude. He has also authored The Subversive Seventies and co-authored Bolivia Beyond the Impasse with Sandro Mezzadra. The interview was originally conducted through the Negation Nightly Radio Hour, which you can listen to here.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sean Alderson (Negation Editor): In The Subversive Seventies, you aimed to write a retelling of relevant political history from the decade. What made you decide to create this sort of critical reevaluation?
Michael Hardt: There are a couple different things that came together. One is that when I first learned about what happened in Italy in the 1970s, I found that really inspiring. From my context, I felt like what happened in Italy in the seventies seemed much more like what we could do in the US, and so Italy in the 70s might have been a first introduction for me. However, in more recent years, many writers have been looking back at different aspects of the 1970s and recognizing their importance. US and British feminists in the past ten years have re-valorized the 1970s and tried to reactivate what was inspiring and powerful about the feminist 1970s. I felt that there was a kind of continuity across various national contexts during the ‘70s that seemed to me to be a powerful element worth studying.
SA: So it was a connection between a couple different things: your existing knowledge of the events of the Italian ‘70s, as well as more recent reevaluations that people have been putting on the decade as a whole in feminist work.
MH: Those are definitely two strong elements of it, and then it became a project, so I learned as much as I could about movements in the 1970s in other countries that seemed to hold something promising for today. I wanted to return to those things that could teach us something today for current political thinking or even current political organizing. What I quickly started understanding is that it wasn't that the movements of the ‘70s provided solutions and we could just follow in their footsteps and do like they did. It was rather that they recognized what seemed to me still are political problems. It's not a matter of solving these problems. It's rather of posing the problems themselves. It might sound like a small thing, but I think actually recognizing a central political problem is a very important and productive element.
SA: I recall you, in the book, framing the '60s versus the '70s as the '60s being the end of an era, whereas the '70s is the beginning of the era we currently live in. Some of the problems that were addressed in the '70s are still very much relevant today, and some of these movements took steps in directions which we can pick up on.
MH: Absolutely. I think it's more familiar to people that the ‘70s are the beginning of our era from the other side, that the forms of repression and control which began in the 1970s are still ours. For instance, the histories of neoliberalism often date it as either starting in Chile with the coup in 1973 or with Reagan and Thatcher at the end of the decade. I think neoliberalism and the accompanying forms of social control we think of as beginning in the ‘70s. That’s super helpful and everything, but it's not what interests me. I'm interested, rather, in the other way, in which the movements of liberation of the 1970s were the beginning for us.
SA: One of the threads that I've noticed in some of your other work has been this notion of resistance being prior to power, which I think was present in Multitude. You have an interest that you've been expressing in what comes from below, what comes from these multiplicities who are resisting power, so that power adapts to respond to the resistance rather than the other way around.
MH: Yeah, I think, there was a certain point in which Toni Negri and I started thinking about a variety of theoretical paradigms in which resistance is prior to power. One of them is in Gilles Deleuze’s book about Foucault, it's really just a footnote, but it's an interesting one. He says people often misread Foucault thinking that resistance is a response to power. He says no, it's just the opposite, that resistance is prior to power. I think Deleuze doesn't actually mean chronologically prior. He means, in his terms, ontologically prior—that resistance is what creates. Just like you just said, power, in some ways, is what falls back or responds. It's a part of the Italian workerist tradition from Mario Tronti's book Workers and Capital in the early 1960s. He says there that the workers' struggles precede and prefigure the developments of capital. First workers strike or workers revolt, and they invent elements that then capitalist development is just responding to. I could give you other examples. There are other ways in which they fit together. I think you're right that this developed with me and Toni as a kind of theoretical principle. It's not an absolute description of reality. It's more like a principle of research. Look for the ways in which struggles are the leading force.
SA: Another question I had concerned some of the chapters in The Subversive Seventies that focus very specifically on encampments. Obviously these chapters have a lot of relevance to recent student activism for Palestine. I wanted to ask what you made of the encampments and what takeaways there might be for those looking to improve or learn from these encampments in the ‘70s.
MH: I'm not sure that they can be instructive in a kind of how-to manual way, but I think that it's interesting that encampments developed as a form of struggle then. Two that I was particularly interested in, one in Japan, which was trying to block the construction of an airport that's become the airport for Tokyo, and then the other in France was trying to block the expansion of a military base in rural, central France. Both of these were rural encampments meant to block mega-projects. They thought that blocking it territorially would be the way to do it, and actually what's more interesting in those encampments, and I think probably in the recent ones you're talking about too, are the kinds of social and political developments that happened in the encampments themselves.
What I was most interested about in the ones in the ‘70s (and I think this would be interesting to think about with the Palestine encampments and also Atlanta's Cop City encampment) is the political dynamic of being together. So, the ones in France and Japan in the ‘70s were a mix, which is different than what we have today, a mix between activists who primarily came from the cities who had a lot of political experience fighting the police and rural peasants that didn't have the same kind of political experience. They lived together for years in these encampments and learned from each other and developed a kind of political education together. I think it’d be very interesting to hear from people about the kind of political education of being together in that way. That was certainly true of an earlier moment, the encampments around 2011 in Egypt and Spain and Greece and the various Occupy things. Being together, actually living together in a 24/7 way offline (of course these movements all had online presence too) I think was a transformative experience for many people and that's one of the things that interests me about the encampments.
I didn't really answer. You kind of posed it and I think I skirted the way you posed it, which was “what can we learn from those encampments in the ‘70s” and I'm not sure we have that kind of direct learning. It might be seeing ourselves in a kind of mirror that could be most helpful. But like I said, also, I think thinking about the kinds of political problems that they were identifying, that might be the way that they could be most helpful.
SA: So not saying “take this given lesson and apply it to the next time you try an encampment,” but more of “understand some of the thoughts and ideas that were being generated, some of the educational ideas.” This dynamic between the urban, more experienced encampment actors, and then the less experienced rural actors—I think you could draw somewhat of a parallel between this notion of inside and outside agitators with regard to the encampments. The outside agitators were people who came from off-campus but who were more experienced, more educated, more familiar in ways of how to deal with police presence. Compared to the rural less-experienced people, you would have the less experienced students.
MH: I could see that. Several of our more recent encampments, well, especially the urban ones, including the campus Palestine ones and then back also to Occupy, they've had a relatively short lifetime. It does have a different character than these rural encampments that last over a very long extended period. I think what I was thinking of in particular is anti-nuclear encampments in the 1970s, primarily the ones that I was focusing on were in Germany, but one thing that was, I thought, quite interesting about them is how much they were really educational projects, even scientific education, with people learning about nuclear energy, about nuclear fission. There was a kind of education for democratic decision-making that goes on in the encampments. And I think that's probably one of the important things that goes on in these, even for short periods in other encampments too, which is undermining the hierarchies based on expertise. It doesn't mean that you can just not know anything and claim you're an expert, rather that all of us have a potential to learn enough to be experts about the history and current politics of Palestine in that case.
SA: So, understanding the role that education plays in both the historical encampments as well as the more recent encampments allows us to get a grasp on how they were able to make decisions in more democratic manners, for whatever time they were able to last.
Another question that I had regarding chapter 16 in the book, which talks about the clandestine armed groups and the secrecy around that. The question I had was: the recent assassination of the healthcare CEO Brian Thompson got a surprising amount of public approval in opinion polls and other such things that appeared on the news. So, thinking back to the ‘70s and the ways those clandestine armed groups functioned, what does it signal to us that there is this public outcry of support, that there is this seeming approval for (in some circles) for his actions. This kind of praise for propaganda of the deed, what could that mean for our present moment?
MH: Yeah, that's interesting. I need to back up a little bit because one of the major obstacles for me in trying to write about the 1970s was the spectacular nature of the clandestine armed groups. Both then and still today, I think, they take up all the space. It's very hard to see beyond them because they were so spectacular. I mean spectacular in a sense of “creating news” and “were hard for people not to pay attention to.” The problem I thought was that they were the least interesting or not very interesting politically, much less interesting than other mass movements that were going on at the time. They sort of stole attention, eclipsed in that way, other movements, and they were minority movements or very small minority movements rather than these mass movements. I felt like I had to try to both deal with them and then set them aside a bit.
But I must admit that when I started writing about them, I had some slightly different opinions about it. One which might then come towards Mangione, like you're pointing out, the assassination of the healthcare CEO, is that these different groups, (the ones I'm specifically thinking about are the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction in Germany, the Weather Underground in the US, a group in Japan (which I didn't know before I started reading about them) the East Asian Anti-Japan Front, the Tupamaros in Uruguay similarly, so these different groups) the thing that is most striking for me studying them is how they all function primarily on an indignation toward the unaccountability of the police and those in power. The violence of those in power is completely without account. What they thought was that if they could educate the population of the country as to what's really going on, that would be transformative politically. So the Japanese group that I mentioned, the East Asian Anti-Japan Front, they recognized quite clearly the facts of Japan's imperialist and imperial past and the damages it had done in the colonized territories in Korea, etc. They thought through a bombing campaign against monuments to the empire that they could do a kind of pedagogy of showing people in the country the continuing nature of the imperial-fascist regime by bombing these different sites and highlighting them. That’s the same thing in Germany too. Part of the argument of the Red-Army Faction was that West Germany had never really denazified. So this indignation about the impunity is what is interesting and striking about them. Rather than these groups just being a bunch of crazy people, one should recognize the logic that they were functioning through. I wonder if, when you're talking about the public outpouring of support for Mangione, it might be something like this: that the impunity of the violence done by the health insurance industry and a variety of supporting things, it’s not so much that it’s a revenge against a specific person, it’s rather highlighting the violence of a system. I think that might be the way. In the ‘70s, in different countries I mentioned, there was a certain amount of public support for these groups, especially in principle.
But let me come back, can I go a little bit further? Because it seems to me there's another layer to this which I think then could get us closer to the present. A good number of these groups, it's certainly true in the case of the Red Army Faction, they recognize that there was no longer any mediation offered by the state or also by capital or even other institutions. And so what they meant by that is that liberal institutions are meant to function (or this is what we're taught) through mediation. When there are antagonisms, the institutions will listen and then will reform based on those sorts of antagonisms. The way that we often think about the U. S. Civil Rights movement is that the 1964 Voting Rights Act is a kind of response to the movement.
But in the early 1970s, many of these groups felt like there's no longer any point in protesting: nobody's listening. The more we protest against the war in Vietnam, for instance, the more they escalate and drop more bombs. So the one rationale then was well, if there is no mediation, there's no potential of a political action that requires a kind of mediation of those in power. They argued that the only way to act was through force, that violence was the only means to act if there was no mediation. I don't think that's actually true, but the part that is true for us today is that many people are recognizing that the forms of mediation are quickly evaporating: instead of mediation, we have repression. That's what they were commenting on then, too. For instance, you can't have a public discussion now about Palestine, especially on a university campus. There can be no mediation and sense of a back and forth that considers some sort of reform. All there is going to be is repression. I think that this would be another instance where I would say, the recognition of the problem was right; the solution of these armed clandestine groups, I think it was mistaken then and I also think it would be mistaken right now. I don't mean to say that any form of political violence is wrong, I just think that the calculation is wrong about its effects and what its possibilities are.
This then brings me back to Mangione, where you started. I think that there is a widespread public recognition that we have no way of influencing the healthcare system and the health insurance system, and so there isn't any sense of a mediation that could go on. So out of frustration, I would say, there’s an enthusiasm for taking that recourse.
SA: I especially liked that chapter on the end of mediation and what drove these groups to form and take the actions that they did. It’s quite easy to think about these recent protests as “well, we can say ‘hands off’, but our hands are off the levers of power”, so the only thing to do is ask nicely whenever you protest. So it becomes this question of, “well, how do we actually get responses?” And that's where you get these people who lean more towards the answer of political violence as the solution to having no recourse or having no institutions to mediate the demands.
MH: Right. That is certainly one logical, even if mistaken, response, but one can explain it without justifying it. I think it did have many detrimental effects at the time. The other response that I recognized among groups in the 1970s was one of seeking greater autonomy, which sometimes could lead to its own dead end in a kind of small, isolated, mutual aid separation. There were other more productive ways, the examples that seemed to be most instructive. It would be an excellent question what they mean for today, the ones that manage to, in a kind of dual strategy, put together both a defense of the community and increasing autonomy.
The obvious example, which most listeners will know about, is the Black Panther Party. They famously not only had the use of force for the defense of the community but also had what I'm calling here “development of strategies of autonomy” like the breakfast program, the free clinics. In some ways if forms of power and the state are not going to respond, one can separate in a way. I think putting the two together actually made for a very, at the time, productive strategy. I'm not sure if I can think about how that would exactly work today. I can think of some contemporary examples, but not in the US for today. But nonetheless, I think it's a way of getting out of the trap, I think, of either the isolated autonomy or the recourse to violence which really separates people from the movements.
That was I think my greatest not really critique, but lament, really, about the clandestine armed groups: that because of their clandestinity, they couldn't participate in the movements, couldn't develop with the movements, couldn’t learn from others in the movement, and they became isolated politically. So they didn't learn politically, that's really what I felt was the biggest lack.
SA: Yeah, I think you included a quote from one of the Red Brigades members when he was talking about never having been able to understand the transformation that went on during the ‘70s, and linking that to the fact that being part of a clandestine armed group separates you from every other aspect of your life outside of the group. It makes it much harder to keep up with the transformation of society as it goes on if you're separated from society.
MH: Absolutely. And just think about how much you learn from doing politics together. Particularly in the 1970s, the men who had come out of the workers' movement, they knew nothing about feminism and slowly, begrudgingly, they learned, but they did it because of the contact, because of the antagonism of the feminists to their patriarchal attitudes, etc. I think each of us, when we look back, can recognize how much we've learned from each other, from being in movements. And that's the kind of thing that one doesn't get if there's that kind of forced separation that clandestinity requires.
SA: I had a question relating to some of the discussions in chapters eight and ten about the industrial labor movements and kind of the deindustrialization periods that happened in Italy and in the United States. Republican tariffs have a stated goal of bringing back industrial labor to the United States of America. We got rid of it fifty some odd years ago, and the stated goal is that we'll bring industrial labor back and be making iPhones in America. So, how might that impact the state of the left labor movement? Could the radicalism of the ‘70s return if industrial labor returns?
MH: Well, the first thing you're very right to point out, and I'm not sure that the Republican architects of these tariffs would be able to understand this point, but the manufacturing in the US and large scale industry was destroyed in the 1970s purposefully, because of the threat of organized workers movements. I don't mean this as a hypothetical, these were the kind of things that were being discussed at the time, among labor management type people, among CEOs of business, etc. They were scared by the most radical and active industrial labor movement that had existed in decades, in the early 1970s.
So in some ways, you're asking, if they were to succeed in bringing back to the US large-scale industry, could that make, again, the possibility of a radical industrial working class in the US? One has to have caution with that idea because the nature of labor in large-scale industry is radically different. It's not as if factories in China today that are manufacturing things that were previously manufactured in the US, it’s not that they're doing it in the same method. The power of industrial workers has been largely eroded purposefully through technological developments, et cetera. So I would caution against the idea that the power of industrial labor could come back in the ways that it existed in the 1970s just because capitalist production has changed so radically in technological terms. That's one aspect.
There’s another aspect that I think is important to recognize. On the one hand, in the 1970s, in the dominant countries, there was an attack on the industrial worker and a displacement of it. I think that's easy enough to recognize. There was also a pressure on the role, the central role of organized industrial workers, in the much wider general revolutionary movement. In previous decades, with difficulties and critiques, there was nonetheless in many countries, the US included, a general idea that the industrial workers and their movement could represent and lead other aspects of revolutionary struggle.
It's much more complicated, but generally, often there was the idea that while the “woman issue” is important (the way it was referred to then) or the “race issue" is important, the issue of workers and their struggle against capital was the primary struggle, and these others were secondary to it. It could represent them, it could lead them, or something like that. I'm reviewing something in rather simple terms, but I just wanted to emphasize that the industrial workers movement was not only attacked from without, from capital. In some ways it was attacked from within, from other sectors of liberation struggles that were unwilling to accord to the industrial workers movement its primary or central role. So I think, in the 1970s, we had those two meeting pressures that both undermined the centrality and power of industrial workers movements. If one were to be able to recreate, despite the technological changes, the kind of power the industrial workers had in the 1970s in a country like the US, there would also be the pressure, which I think has now been really consolidated, that the workers' movement as a whole and certainly industrial workers as a fragment of it, will no longer be accepted as a primary struggle, one that can represent the others.
I think that that is over, and I think that's a good thing in a way. There's a widely accepted notion within the movements that that's no longer going to be the case. I think I'm right about that. I do recognize that many friends, comrades do feel the need to return to what one might call a class-first position, that emphasizes not necessarily industrial labor but the domination of capital as primary and other axes of domination as secondary. I think that's a mistake and I also don't think that that's a practicable position within the activist circles that I'm familiar with.
SA: So even if industrial labor returned, it wouldn't bring back the same position of influence that the industrial laborers held within the workers' movement in addition to the fact that technological changes would undermine the ability to bring back that same radicalism.
MH: I think both, yeah, you're right. I think that's what I'm thinking in both cases.
SA: The discussion of the term working class is something I penned a decent length article for our magazine about. The idea of working class versus multitude or whatever term you lean towards. That discussion of class-first organizing and whether or not that's viable. I feel like that's one of the more hot button issues, at least in the circles that I traverse. So I appreciate you speaking on that.
MH: Toni and I, when we started talking about multitude, we had two very different things in mind that we were trying to combine with it. They have sometimes been confused. One was to just recognize the existing multiplicities, like you're saying. We recognized that the working class can't be represented by a single element of it, say the industrial workers. The working class is widely multiple. It includes all varieties of sectors, service workers, but also unwaged workers, reproductive workers in the home. The unemployed should probably be a part of that too. We thought about the multiplicity of the working class itself and then also thought about the multiplicity of the range of liberation movements, that the working class should always be thought of within a wider frame of other struggles for liberation: racial struggles, gender struggles, et cetera. So anyway, all that's on one side, as a multitude meant as a recognition of reality, looking at what exists. We would always posit that in each era, you always have to do an analysis of class composition because the working class isn't what it used to be, so you have to look at what it is. All of that goes on the side of multitude as an empirical recognition.
But we also meant multitude as an organizational project, not as something that already exists. Toni was very insistent about saying multitude is a class concept, which then seemed to confuse people;they’d say “It's one or the other. Is it multitude, or is it class?” And it's a class concept in the sense of recognizing the multiplicity of the forms of labor, recognizing that the working class is not one thing, it's many things that are under an umbrella, and thus requires a project of organization to make it into a class in the sense of being an active and effective political agent. That's what we mean by class. In some ways the two sides of this are tracking exactly the two ways that Marx and Engels at times use the notion of class, the technical terms of class-in-itself and class-for-itself, that’s just what we're saying here. Multitude is, on the one hand, like the class in-itself, it's an empirical recognition that all of those people have nothing to sell but their labor power. But that's not a class for Marx and Engels in the way they want it. They say it has to be organized as a class, which would then become a political agent and be able to act for itself. I guess you could divide the two sides of what we mean by multitude that way.
I think that multitude was a way of thinking or rethinking what class means in the contemporary context. That's the way we thought of it. I don't mean that there are no differences here, but I think it's important to isolate where they reside.
SA: Thanks, that's actually really helpful in elucidating the difference (or the supposed difference) between the way people use different terms with regard to class. For me, one of the more enlightening parts of the multitude concept was the discussion of how it exists and yet doesn't exist at the same time. It initially seems very paradoxical, but it does make a lot more sense if you understand that it's a bit of a project and an already existing analysis of the way things are.
Jordan Cooper (Negation Editor): We’d like to shift things over to discussing your recent book about Bolivia, Bolivia Beyond the Impasse. For reference, I'm an anthropologist. I'm currently living in Bolivia, in La Paz. So the topic of the book is near and dear to my heart, obviously. The political situation in Bolivia is far from ideal and the impasse has only gotten more complicated since you published your book. Since you published the book, the economy has worsened significantly, and also the blood feud between Evo and Arce and the consequent total division of the MAS has become all-consuming. What sort of implications do you think this has for the viability of the MAS as a vehicle for change, now that Arce is politically dead and Evo is inhibited from running?
MH: I wonder if it might be good, before addressing that question about the viability of the MAS and the political future, to review. I think people should try to understand what's been so special and inspirational about Bolivian politics for the last 20 years. We get to this impasse/tragedy now, but look back in retrospect at the fact of Evo’s election. Look at the combination of anti-neoliberal movements, the first indigenous president, and the extraordinary politics that comes out of indigenous movements. They link together, (what they were calling it at the time) plebeian politics, worker politics, and agricultural unions. The extraordinary nature of 2006 itself is something worth remembering. There are all ways of criticizing what the MAS has done over the last twenty-ish years. But it's really the only one of the progressive (we'll have to probably deal with that term at some point) governments from that first decade of the century that still in some sense remains now. I mean Lula's back in power, sort of. Venezuela, whatever one's going to think about it. Ecuador, of course, has gone through different phases. In short, there's the indigenous nature of the movement, its political radicality, and then its longevity.
I’m thinking about people who are outside Bolivia, though you're in the midst of it. I think probably part of the reason you're there in the first place is because of the specialness and excitement of this. I was just thinking some listeners might not be familiar. Before we get into criticizing, I think it's good for them to recognize first of all that it's quite an extraordinary process. Maybe that's why it seems all the more tragic that things could fall apart, because of the promise that it holds. So Sandro Mezzadra and I wrote this together, and two of the things that interested us were to recognize the accomplishments of the movement and appreciate them. Even the transformation of the role of indigenous populations in the society and in the government is something that has really changed in these years. There are all kinds of problems, but nonetheless, that's something important.
JC: Yeah, the changes to racism and its prevalence in Bolivian society and the measures of social inclusion that Evo’s government did are the things that most people hear, whether they love or hate the MAS (because it is very divisive). Most people here, unless they're completely far right revanchists, recognize that as perhaps the most transformative effect of his government: the fact that now, open racism is not accepted.
MH: Right. Even just in linguistic terms, the old racist slurs that were relatively common previously are not part of the discourse. Maybe that's just a symptom really for the more substantial ways in which there's been a racial transformation.
JC: And the 2019 coup was, in all of its symbolism and discourse, very much a racist reaction to this.
MH: Right, even the burning of the Wiphala, the burning of the flag. So there was a reactionary coup, a right-wing coup in 2019, that overthrew the MAS government, the socialist government. But like you're saying, it was in some ways clarifying that it wasn't just an economic-interest-coup for the people with large terrains of land in the east. It was also clarifyingly a white supremacist reaction to the power of a previously subordinate racial majority.
JC: That's an interesting thing, too, because during Evo's government, for instance, he tried his absolute best to maintain amicable relations with those kinds of agriculture barons that you're mentioning. They were not mistreated by any means in his government. If anything, something he was criticized for from the left was for trying to be too amicable with these groups. His argument was always “If I'm not playing nice with them, I can't govern.” And obviously we found that in the end that it didn’t even matter that he was favorable to them, they still wanted to be rid of him.
MH: We probably should recognize this as a mixture of economic interests and racial interests that are irreconcilable, I guess. The other thing that Sandro and I were interested in (and maybe leave unresolved) is whether we could understand an alternative notion of development. I guess he and I have been, for a while, unsatisfied. For me, I feel like we need to resurrect the concept of development, not that development is equal to growth, but rather that it has a social form, it has an economic form, and that it can be done in such a way that is beneficial and that corresponds with ecological interests and social interests. So anyway, it seemed to us another way. This was part of our investigation to understand current economic possibilities within Bolivia, but many of them had already failed by the time we were looking into them. We had questions about lithium development, etc. The fact that they failed doesn't mean that they don't provide a helpful way of thinking, if our interest is to understand things.
JC: Right, lithium is still officially the government's goal, but there's still no success to speak of unfortunately. Although recently I believe they signed contracts (to much criticism, because the contracts weren't made public) with a Chinese company and with a Russian company. What's interesting for me is where they get the international cooperation to do that. Bolivia's dream, as you mentioned in the book, is to industrialize lithium with sovereignty in a nationalized way. And you guys talked about in the book how it would be ideal to do that in conjunction with Chile and Argentina for geographic reasons, which makes a ton of sense. Although for political reasons, at least with Argentina, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. But for me, the possibility for China to cooperate with Bolivia in this, I think, is something that would make a lot of sense for Bolivia and for China. It would be an interesting new cooperation for China in the Western Hemisphere, and for Bolivia to have a chance at industrializing lithium. Whether they could become like a battery producer, like they really want, who knows.
MH: Well it would require, if I understand correctly, the cooperation and the technology from another country, whether that be Germany or China or something like that. Technology from elsewhere would have to be given as part of the agreement so that Bolivia could both refine the lithium so that it could be battery-grade and be able to construct the batteries. I don't think it's unreasonable to work towards such things. I'm not the kind of person who believes that in a country like Bolivia that we should just leave all the lithium in the ground.
JC: Yeah, it’s not even an opinion you’ll find in Bolivia. The indigenous communities who live in that area have tended to be opposed to it, but not on the grounds that they're opposed to mining conceptually—more so that they think they're not getting a big enough piece of the pie with the deal, which is totally fair. None of the details of the contracts have ever been published, so they're probably not, but who knows. The problem is that Bolivia's tried to do that model of industrialization with gas. I also wanted to ask: when and how did you do your research on Bolivia for the book?
MH: We were just there for a month in the summer of the year before it was published. I had been in Bolivia for a month, 10 years earlier, with Toni. We were invited by the vice president, and we were sent around by the vice presidency as part of their outreach program. It was great for me because I did learn a lot and meet a lot of people in different parts of the country. So that was helpful, the context I had maintained and was in touch with to be able to then return. I had some bases of access with some things, but mostly it was really just us. Sandro has much more experience in different Latin American countries and has worked on many of these topics. Anyway, that's more or less the way we did it. Compared to what you're doing, it was in a relatively short period of time. We recognize we have an external viewpoint on these things, so we're not pretending to be the kind of experts that others are. Nonetheless, it seemed both instructive for us, thinking about Bolivia for its own sake, but also about what could be of interest to those outside.
JC: As context for the general listener, Bolivia's economy is on the precipice of total collapse, to put it bluntly. Inflation, as I’ve noticed while living here, is absolutely insane. I think it's the second or third highest rate in the continent after Venezuela and Argentina. Everyday people are struggling to afford basic necessities. There have been constant protests in recent weeks and months [as of the time of this interview], mostly roadblocks, as is Bolivian tradition. They’re demanding the government do anything at all about the fact there’s an acute shortage of dollars, that the basic products are too expensive, and things like that. There's also been an acute fuel crisis because the government can't really pay to import gasoline anymore. Bolivia has passed from being a net hydrocarbon exporter to an importer.
There's no real legitimacy left for the economic system or for the political party, the MAS, that is running it. So in that context, is Bolivia still at an impasse? Would it even be beneficial for the MAS to win in this conjuncture, or would it almost be better to have the right left holding the bag to give the left some time to regroup and form a new political project?
MH: Those are very difficult calculations, but I think you're right to divide up the two crises. There’s the economic crisis on the one hand which seems currently unsolvable. It doesn't seem to me that there's an easy solution that those in power are just not doing. Then, somewhat separate, but of course related is the political crisis of the party itself. It’s often thematized like you said, as the conflict between Evo, the former leader of the party, and Arce, the current leader of the party. So the two seemingly unresolvable crises are coincident. The advantage that Bolivia's had over some other neighboring countries, at least in recent periods, is that the right in Bolivia seems to be incapable of unifying or even putting forward plausible political leaders, and that's helpful. For instance, the coup failed so miserably partly because of that in 2019. I can understand what you mean by asking or hypothesizing “perhaps it would be better for the left to have the right take power while the economic conditions are so disastrous and the left needs a new foundation”. The difficulty of making such judgments is that a lot of terrible things could happen in the meantime with the right in power. It could have some horrible effects. Luckily for all involved I'm not the one making these political decisions. Those kinds of pragmatic political decisions one can’t make, too, outside the content. It's even hard to hypothesize about them outside of daily dynamics that they’re functioning under.