Within the Horizon of an Actuality: The State and the Commons in the Eternal Return of Communism

This essay connects Jodi Dean’s and Bruno Bosteels’s works on the “horizon” and the “actuality” of communism with some of the problems that constituted the political landscape during the past decade in Bolivia and in the past years (2011-13) of Occupy Wall Street. It proposes that the old issues that composed the problematic of dual power in the Latin America of the seventies are transposed into the present in the guise of the question regarding the commons and the state. To stage this, the article traces a brief history of the transformation of the question, from René Zavaleta Mercado’s accounts of various situations of dual power in the Bolivia of the 1960s and early 1970s to Raquel Gutiérrez’s transformation/translation of some of Zavaleta Mercado’s positions in Los ritmos del Pachakuti.