Number 30 - August 2006
Workers ACTION
If
in Latin America every election is effectively a referendum on neo-liberalism,
the result in
The scale of Morales’s victory on December 18 was nothing
short of staggering. He got 54 per cent of the vote, the largest vote a
presidential candidate has achieved in 30 years, on a turnout of 84 per cent.
Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga, the main candidate of the pro-US, mainly white or mestizo
oligarchy and a Washington favourite, managed a mere 28.5 per cent. Had the
Electoral Council not disenfranchised more than a million, mainly indigenous
voters, Morales’s victory might have been even more overwhelming. In the Andean
departments, where the predominantly Aymara and Quechua indigenous people live,
the figures speak for themselves. In
Even
in
On the crest of an
anti-imperialist wave
This
victory didn’t come out of nowhere. In October 2003, President Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada (‘Goni’) was obliged to resign and flee to
Gas
sparked off this insurrection.
The
gas war followed the water war of 1999-2000. In 1999, the World Bank
pressurised the Bolivian government into privatising the water companies. It
refused credit to the public company which ran the water services, insisted
that there be no subsidies to mitigate price hikes, and turned the whole supply
over to a subsidiary of International Water Ltd, owned by Bechtel, one of the
Central
to Bolivian culture is the coca leaf, long used as an appetite suppressant and
to combat altitude sickness. For several years now, coca growers have been
involved in a struggle for survival against US policy in
When
in 2002 Morales first ran for president, the ex-US ambassador Manuel Rocha
threatened Bolivia with a loss of international aid if Morales won. Rocha’s
intervention pushed Morales’s vote to within 1.5 per cent of the winner,
Lozada. Coca growers have demanded a pause in eradication, the modification of
the anti-drug laws and a study of legal coca markets. In January and February 2003
a mass mobilisation of coca-growing peasants demanded the suspension of coca
eradication, the nationalisation of privatised industries and services and an
end to the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Many
of the coca growers used to be tin miners. Tin used to be Bolivia’s chief
export until the price crashed in the 1980s partly due to the release by the
USA onto the world market of its tin reserves. The tin miners had always been
the most militant sector of the Bolivian working class. In 1985, Víctor Paz
Estenssoro privatised the tin mines that had been nationalised under his first
presidency following the national revolution of 1952. His right-hand man was
none other than the then up-and-coming US-educated technocrat, Lozada.
Neo-liberalism’s
impact on Bolivia has been bloody and terrible. When the mines were privatised,
the miners’ union, with a long and proud history of militancy and courage, was
crushed and 20,000 miners were ‘localised’, in other words, sacked, dispersed
and ‘relocated’ to the informal sector in the shantytowns. Bolivia was always
one of the poorest countries in South America. Unquestionably, the neo-liberal
assault has made it poorer, destroying the state sector, increasing
unemployment and underemployment, and weakening the social protection that kept
many Bolivians from starvation. Seventy per cent of Bolivians now live in
poverty. Bolivia’s rich natural resources are looted by US or European
multinationals. In the name of the ‘war against drugs’, Bolivians are prevented
from making a living in one of the few ways they can. In the name of the ‘war
against terrorism’, money in Britain’s aid budget earmarked for, among other
countries, Bolivia has been diverted to pay for the occupation of Iraq. It must
come as a terrible disappointment to Tony Blair that the Bolivians remain
stubbornly unconvinced of the merits of globalisation!
Lozada’s
replacement, the former vice-president, Carlos Mesa, clearly felt the people’s
anger, and in his inaugural address was forced to adopt a conciliatory tone: ‘I
want to create a country for all Bolivians . . . where we can respect
the equality of everyone.’ Aware that he might suffer the same fate as his
despised predecessor, he admitted: ‘I am only going to be the president if I
serve you [the country] because if you end up serving me, you will kick me
out.’ As it happened, whatever Mesa proposed was either too much for the
multinationals, or not enough for the workers’ and peasants’ organisations. In
April 2005, in a TV address, he confirmed what all Bolivians already knew, that
the multinationals were running the country and would not tolerate any
reduction in their influence.
This
impasse resulted in a further insurrectionary upsurge, even greater and more
politically advanced than that of 2003. With El Alto once again at its centre,
this movement, led by the national trade union confederation (COB) as well as
numerous other workers’, peasants’ and community organisations, had as its main
demand the nationalisation of gas. If the parliament could not meet this
demand, then, these organisations insisted, it should be shut down. In the main
cities, cabildos abiertos or mass
meetings took place on a daily basis, often hundreds or thousands strong. Mesa
resigned. To escape the masses, parliament sat in Sucre instead of La Paz, but
demonstrators surrounded the parliament nonetheless, forcing the oligarchy to
forgo its first choice of interim president, Vaca Díez, in favour of Eduardo
Rodríguez, head of the Supreme Court.
Morales,
then, is surfing on a revolutionary, anti-imperialist wave. After his victory,
in Cuba he signed agreements with Fidel Castro for Cuba to develop eye
hospitals in Bolivia and help in the training of Bolivian medical students.
Cuba will also assist Bolivian anti-illiteracy programmes. In Caracas, he
signed agreements for Venezuelan funding of health and education programmes,
and a trade deal, exchanging Venezuelan oil for Bolivian soya. Hugo Chávez
proclaimed that he and Morales were part of an ‘axis of good’. Morales, for his
part, announced that ‘We are joining in this anti neo-liberal and
anti-imperialist struggle’.
But
is he?
Morales
does not only have to worry about the armed forces, the oligarchy, the USA, the
oil and gas multinationals, the IMF, and the threats of the eastern provinces
to secede. He is not short of critics from his left either. These critics come
from the Bolivian left and the workers’ movement, and also from the
international revolutionary left. These two sources of criticism are related,
with the revolutionary left having some presence in Bolivia, and the left
outside Bolivia taking its cue from the critics inside the country. The
criticisms of Morales are that he has been less than energetic in supporting
the demands of the masses, that his is a ‘populist’ rather than socialist
movement, based on the indigenous peasantry rather than the working class, and
that he has manoeuvred an opportunity for the working class to take power into
an electoral blind alley.
On
the face of it, Morales may have a case to answer. During the October 2003
uprising, he apparently played no part, being on a trip to Europe at the time.
When Mesa, caught between the masses and the multinationals, proposed a
referendum on the question of gas ownership, Morales supported it, coming under
fierce criticism from the COB, which called for a boycott. In the uprising of
May-June 2005, the MAS leaders were calling for royalties on gas exports to be
increased from 18 per cent to 50 per cent, far short of the popular demand that
if parliament could not guarantee the nationalisation of gas, then it should be
shut down. The MAS staged its own demonstration in favour of the 50 per cent
demand, separate from the larger one organised by the COB and other organisations,
which called for nationalisation. Morales apparently appeared on television
appealing for the lifting of strikers’ roadblocks. MAS leader Ramón Loayza had
to admit that his party had been ‘surpassed by the ranks’. He was obliged to
issue an ultimatum to parliament to nationalise gas within four days or be
closed down.
Morales’s
critics have seized on his decision to sell the Mutún iron mine, which contains
one of the largest reserves of iron and manganese in the world. This sale had
been suspended by former president Rodríguez, under pressure from local MAS
deputies, as well as trade unions, environmental groups and peasant
organisations in the area. Morales has also drawn criticism for saying to
businessmen in Santa Cruz, a hotbed of reaction, that he would respect their
right of ‘autonomy’. Some of his cabinet appointees (the economic ones as
opposed to the ‘social’ ones) are questionable such as Salvador Riera, a Santa
Cruz businessman, as minister for public works, and Luis Alberto Arce, who has
links with the IMF, as finance minister. Moreover, on his whistle-stop,
pre-inauguration tour, Morales did not just visit Cuba and Venezuela. His
visits to France and Spain were widely interpreted as goodwill gestures to
reassure, among others, the Spanish giant Repsol that its investment in Bolivia
is safe in his hands. A phrase that kept cropping up in the communiqués from
those meetings was ‘legal guarantees’ of investments.
It
is important to understand the appalling pressures facing Morales and his government.
Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. It has been ruined by 20 years
of neo-liberalism. The oligarchy may try to use the armed forces to sabotage
his administration. In particular, the oligarchy in Santa Cruz and other
eastern lowland departments will threaten to secede, thus breaking up the
state, if they do not get their own way. Just over the border from the would-be
secessionists, in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, a US military base is being
developed, capable of housing 16,000 troops. The Paraguayan senate has voted to
grant this base immunity from Paraguayan law, as well as International Criminal
Court justice. Paraguay looks set to play the same role as Honduras did in the
1980s. Paul Wolfowitz of the World Bank has already offered Morales his
‘advice’, to help Bolivia with ‘mechanisms to ensure transparent, responsible
and intelligent investment’. Reporting on Morales’s visit to South Africa, the South African Daily Star set out what
his enemies hope will be his most likely course: ‘Though Morales has alarmed
conservatives, some South Africans who have encountered him believe that his
rhetoric is mostly designed for popular consumption . . . they
believe he is a rough diamond who will lose some of his rough edges and gain
more polish when he actually tries to run his country.’ In other words, the
forces ranged against Morales will do their best to make sure that he turns out
to be another Lula rather than another Chávez.
However,
a mere 48 hours after his inauguration he appointed as his oil minister Andres
Soliz Rada who, as a journalist and congress member, has spent 30 years
campaigning for state ownership of oil and gas. Soliz has repeated Morales’s
promise to renationalise gas and oil reserves. Morales has said he will nationalise
the subsoil, in that he will impose state ownership on the gas and oil that is
extracted, but he will not expropriate the assets of the multinationals
involved in extracting it. He says he will review the contracts with the
multinationals, asking them to pay higher taxes and royalties. In his own
words: ‘Any state has the right to use its natural resources. We must establish
new contracts with the oil companies based on equilibrium. We are going to
guarantee the returns on their investment and their profits, but not looting
and stealing.’ (In seeking to negotiate new contracts on far better terms,
rather than, at this stage, going for complete expropriation, Morales appears
to be following the Venezuelan example, although there, the foreign oil
companies are now joint enterprises with the state oil company, the PDVSA.)
Further,
Morales has maintained his promise to repeal the hated decree 20160, which,
allowing ‘employment at will’, has been the framework for the neo-liberal
policies of the past 20 years. He has promised to distribute untilled land, but
not to expropriate the latifundia, or
large estates. He has stated categorically that he will defy the demands of the
USA to eradicate the growth of coca, and has appointed a coca-grower as
minister of social defence, responsible for coca. He has dismissed the entire
military high command, whom he believes to be disloyal. He has placed the
privatised national airline, LAB, under the control of a government
‘administrator’ for 90 days in order to investigate allegations of
asset-stripping, allegations which had prompted a pilots’ strike. He has asked
Bush to extradite Lozada to answer charges arising out of the murder of
demonstrators in October 2003. Not a bad record for his first few weeks in
office!
Some
of this may look disappointing to those who demanded nationalisation of
multinationals’ assets, and isn’t a ‘return on profit’ to the satisfaction of
energy multinationals merely ‘looting and stealing’?
However,
while no one should lose any sleep over the fate of the oil and gas
multinationals or their shareholders, and while the nationalisation of
imperialist assets, giving Bolivia complete control of its resources, must be
an aim, to make support of the government conditional on whether Morales
nationalises without compensation this or that imperialist asset would be
sectarian and wrong. If Morales is to carry out real change, and therefore if
his tenure is to be more than a heroic, and doomed, 15 minutes of fame, he has
got to proceed patiently and carefully, pick his battles, and take on his
enemies one at a time, and under conditions of his choosing when he knows he
can win. There’s a story in Venezuela that during the coup attempt of 2002,
Chávez phoned Fidel Castro for advice and was told, ‘Do anything, but do not do
another Allende on us’. This is an enigmatic remark, with a multitude of
possible meanings: possibly ‘better to live to fight another day than choose a
glorious martyrdom’. Or on the other hand, did it mean, ‘if you think generals
might be disloyal, do not promote them’? Or ‘if the people demand arms, do not
refuse them’? Or did he mean all three of these?
The
support of the masses is essential. They expect from Morales more than from
possibly any other government in Bolivia’s history, including the national
revolutionary government of 1952. He has promised ‘zero corruption, zero
bureaucracy’, and as if to prove it, has halved his own salary. The more
Morales sticks to this, the more accountable he is to the mass organisations,
and the more open his government is about the real and genuine difficulties it
faces, the more likely the workers and peasants are to be patient if all of
their expectations cannot be met overnight.
It
is sometimes necessary to distinguish between the understandable impatience of
the masses and their organisations and the sectarianism of the vanguard. It is
sectarianism and factionalism, spilling over from previous disputes, which
seems to be at the root of the hostility shown by some workers’ leaders towards
Morales. Take Jaime Solares, leader of the COB, for example. He is apparently
in favour of a ‘worker-peasant revolution of a socialist character’ and yet
refuses to support a MAS government. While furiously denying that he will
support a military coup, he says: ‘I never called on soldiers to carry out a
military coup. I simply said that if a soldier who was patriotic and committed
to the people took power in Bolivia, like Chávez in Venezuela, I would be the
first to support him.’ (International Viewpoint No.373, December 2005).
It
seems that Morales is too right wing for Solares because of his position on gas
royalties, and because his base is the indigenous peasantry as opposed to the
working class, to the extent that his government is a worse option than a
military coup! Just what kind of sectarian gibberish is this? What kind of
signal does it send out to the oligarchy and to the military? If you are
plotting to overthrow Morales’s government and install a military demagogue
(who says he is ‘just like Chávez’) a section of the workers’ movement will
support you! There is a section of the Bolivian military said to be sympathetic
to the mass organisations, and Bolivia has seen pro-left, anti-US generals in
the past, notably General Torres, briefly in power in 1971, but to talk of
military intervention at this time, counterposed to the movement which was on
the point of electing Morales by such a landslide almost beggars belief.
As
for the accusation, if that is what it is, that Morales is insufficiently
‘proletarian’, it has to be said that neither Morales nor his party are from
the traditional Bolivian left. Morales does not, and has never claimed to be a
Marxist, and therefore he should not be judged as one. But doesn’t any movement
towards socialism in a country such as Bolivia involve a coalition of all the
oppressed? Wasn’t it a coalition of the oppressed that led the uprisings in
2003 and 2005? Isn’t this the kind of coalition being constructed by Chávez in
Venezuela? If Chávez had relied on support only from wage earners in factories,
he might well be history by now. Aren’t the coca growers on the cutting edge of
the confrontation with the USA? Over the past 20 years, centres of working
class militancy have been broken up. Many workers are now in the ‘informal sector’:
the street traders, one-man or one-woman businesses, taxi-drivers and so on.
This sector, consisting in large part of ex-miners and recent immigrants from
the countryside, and engaged in a struggle for survival, has a considerable
social weight in Bolivia, as it does all over Latin America. It would be as
ridiculous to regard these people as petit-bourgeois in the European sense, as
it would to regard Bolivian teachers, for example, as such. What is important,
surely, is what this movement does, and that is a political, not a sociological
issue.
The
third fundamental criticism of Morales, that his election victory represents a
conscious turn away from the workers of Bolivia taking power for themselves, is
only sustainable if there was a realistic possibility of power being seized in
the middle of 2005. Now, the uprising of 2005 was broad-based, one in which all
the oppressed and downtrodden in Bolivia were represented. The widespread and
popular demand that the government nationalise the gas, coming as it did after
the gas war of 2003, and the water war, showed what the mass movement thought
of neo-liberalism and its local representatives. The demand that parliament
nationalise the gas or be closed down represented a visceral desire not to go
on living in the old way, as did the resolutions emanating from the trade
unions, peasant unions and the cabildos
abiertos calling for a workers’ and peasants’ government. The cabildos abiertos themselves represented
an attempt, albeit a short-lived one, at direct, participatory democracy. But
the workers and peasants did not take power. The COB leaders apparently blame
the lack of a revolutionary party. But if we are to assume that the existence
of such a party is a prerequisite for the taking of power, then doesn’t the
lack of one suggest that the movement was not quite as politically advanced as
has been claimed. (Solares’s addled comments about a ‘patriotic’ officer
breaking the logjam appear to bear this out.) The Bolivian masses cannot have
been short of advice from the representatives within Bolivia of the
international far left on the merits of a revolutionary party, but maybe,
looking at the numerous Trotskyist nanosects, they did not like what they saw.
It
is one thing to advance the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government, and
for that slogan to enjoy a degree of popularity among the workers’ and
peasants’ organisations. For it to be realisable in any real, immediate,
concrete way is quite another. While the cabildos
abiertos were clearly a valuable experience in popular, participatory
democracy, they were not able to consolidate into something more permanent,
assuming administrative functions and thus posing the question: who really
rules this country? This is what the soviets were able to do in Russia in 1917,
hence the correctness of the slogan ‘All power to the soviets’. (One of the
problems with discussions of this sort is the tendency to use the particular
conditions in Russia as an all-purpose revolutionary template. However, just
occasionally the comparison is a useful one!) Another comparison is with
Portugal in 1974-75, where the Socialist Party, backed by the EEC and the CIA,
did channel the militancy of workers into electoralism. However, an alternative
existed in the form of the federation of 2000 factory councils, or plenarios, 200 of which were, by March
1975, running their enterprises, as well as rural co-operatives based on land
seizures, the co-operative nurseries, clinics and so on.
Whatever
was positive about the uprising of 2005, there was never a dual power
situation, with the working class exercising executive power in a way which was
able to supersede the power of the Bolivian state. Instead, the masses saw the
December elections as a practical, realisable way in which they could express
their demands and advance their interests. They see the victory of Morales as
their victory, against the oligarchy, and against the USA.
Therefore,
the verdict on the three charges made against Morales by his left, or ultraleft
critics, must be not guilty, or at least not proven. So how should Marxists
interpret events in Bolivia, and if they are present there, what should they
do?
To
understand fully the significance of events in Bolivia, Marxists need to understand
firstly that revolution is a process and not an event (as Marxist scholars
Sweezey and Huberman say in their book Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution:
‘It unfolds through many stages and phases. It never stands still’), and
secondly that in Bolivia socialist revolution must inevitably adopt a national,
anti-imperialist character.
What
does the first of these propositions mean? It means that the process started by
the water war, continued by the gas war, then the uprising of 2005 and now
finding its expression in the landslide election victory of Morales has yet to
realise its full potential. In other words, the situation is fluid – we don’t
know how things are going to turn out. In his actions since his election,
Morales has not, despite the predictions of his left critics, sold out. It is
up to the most class-conscious vanguard of the workers’ and peasants’ movement
to make sure he continues in the same vein and that if he does, and he comes
under attack, to support him.
When
Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1998, he had a certain history as a left
nationalist and had attempted a coup in 1992. At first, he followed that same
course: opposition to the Venezuelan elite and redistributive economic and
social policies, and all the while professing to follow a ‘middle way’ between
socialism and capitalism. Like Morales, Chávez had some right-wingers in his
cabinet. Only by the beginning of 2005 did he as much as admit that he’d been
making a mistake, and that there was no middle way. Not only does he now lard
his speeches with quotations from and references to Lenin, Trotsky and
Luxemburg, but also he has announced the need to transcend capitalism and build
socialism. Why and how has he had the space and time to be able to do this?
Partly because the price of oil has allowed him to deliver the redistributive
policies which he promised, partly because his opponents have been disorganised
and disunited, partly because the USA has been preoccupied with Iraq, but also
because the masses have been prepared to give him the benefit of their support
at important junctures – the 2002 coup, the 2003 sabotage and the numerous
elections and referenda in between times. This is because they know that he is
on their side, that there is a fundamental difference between Chávez and the
alternative, and that to think otherwise is sectarian stupidity. It means that
Chávez has had a base of support which will defend him, but also act as a
counterweight to some of the more timid or right-wing members of the Chávez
bloc.
This
is so even though Chávez has not been able to do everything at once.
Initiatives such as the misiones
which are attacking the grotesque inequalities in society, the expropriation of
idle estates, the nationalisation of enterprises, and the cogestión (co-management between workers and the state) have all
been put in place since 1998. These measures do not make Venezuela socialist:
workers’ control exists only on an ad hoc basis, there is no democratic plan of
production, and, most importantly, the bourgeoisie has not been dispossessed as
a class, but they do put the oligarchy very much on the defensive, and put the
masses in a position where they are more likely to defend these previous
conquests and go on to make new ones. These measures make the realisation of socialism
a far more realistic proposition than before, and the process begun in 1998 has
not yet run its course. But at the risk of labouring the point, back in 1998
they were not there, they have all been implemented since, in a period of
zigzag experimentation, setback and advance, some hard lessons and tough
choices.
This
is what is more than likely to happen in Bolivia. Events will not unfold in
exactly the same way of course, and Morales has already benefited from the
presence of Chávez, and may yet benefit from friendly regimes in Mexico and
Peru, depending on election results. Certain sectarian critics of Morales in
Bolivia and elsewhere may not like the prospect, probably because they have a
picture inside their heads of what they think a revolution should look like – a
putschist caricature of 1917 perhaps, with Morales as Kerensky and, presumably,
someone resembling themselves as Lenin. While such a model is almost certainly
inapplicable anywhere, we should also remember that these people do the Bolsheviks
a disservice: the Bolsheviks were not above a certain revolutionary pragmatism
and patience when it was required.
This
perspective does not imply blind faith in Morales, and he should certainly not
be above criticism. If Morales makes mistakes or unjustifiable concessions, the
workers’ and peasants’ organisations should call him to account. They should
exert their own influence on Morales, to counter that of his right-wing
ministers and the pressure from outside the country. Morales may even collapse
altogether. It seems that some of the most sectarian naysayers are almost
wishing that he will, so that they can say ‘We told you so! Only a Trotskyist
party armed with a programme etc., etc., . . .’. We do not know what
will happen, although we do know that Bolivian history is littered with the
political (and physical) corpses of revolutionary nationalists who capitulate
to imperialism or the oligarchy, and of revolutionary Marxists who retreat into
their own sectarian laager. Marxists should maintain their political
independence from Morales, and be prepared to sketch in the blanks,
ideologically speaking. But to counterpose now to this already existing
movement some ultra-‘revolutionary’ sect which exists principally in the minds
of its advocates would be simply inane. Remember: ‘philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’.
Morales
has promised to ‘refound’ Bolivia, by holding elections within six months for a
Constituent Assembly. A lot depends on what this assembly is based on, how it
is elected, and what it can do. This must not be merely a slightly more
democratic version of the existing, discredited parliamentary set-up, but must
provide a more popular and far more direct democracy, based on workers’ and
peasants’ organisations. If it does, it will provide a huge impetus to
resistance movements in US allies such as Colombia and Peru. Morales has spoken
of introducing a bill into Congress in March, with a view to Assembly elections
taking place in July. He has emphasised that, if necessary, people would force
the Congress to approve the Assembly. The Assembly’s unlimited powers will,
according to Morales, ‘eliminate the colonial state and neo-liberal model’. If
Morales is as good as his word, then Bolivia can take a further huge step
against neo-liberalism, and towards solving the crisis of the unreformed
Bolivian state.
Over
the past 20 years or so, the mechanism of domination by North American and
European capital over Latin America has undergone a profound change. Until the
1980s, military dictatorships, many of them almost unbelievably brutal, were
commonplace. The fate of Guatemala’s Arbenz, toppled by US intervention in
1954, was typical of that which awaited progressive elected governments. By the
1970s, Chile and Uruguay, both countries with a history of stable democratic
government, were competing for the title of torture chamber of Latin America.
The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua suffered a slow death by strangulation at
the hands of the Contras and their US backers.
Now,
the kill is cleaner. Every country on the continent has an elected civilian
government, but beyond issuing a passport, staffing embassies in various
capitals and sending a team to the Copa America, there is precious little that
that government can actually do. This hollowing out of the nation state is the
inevitable product of the economic policies known, in shorthand, as
globalisation, the internationalisation of the neo-liberal policies of
deregulation and privatisation pursued domestically by Thatcher and Reagan
during the 1980s, and now imposed by the World Trade Organisation, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on the rest of the world. These
bodies are made up of representatives of nation states, and dominated by the
most powerful states, predominantly the USA. The USA particularly represents
its own agenda, the agenda of its leading corporations, as the international
order.
The
effect in Bolivia, as in the rest of the continent, has been a dramatic
increase in levels of poverty and inequality. However, unlike most of Europe,
where the response has been a decrease in voter turnout as political parties
squabble over a minute patch of the so-called middle ground, voters in Latin
America (where in some countries, voting is compulsory) have used their
new-found electoral freedom to boot out the lackeys of the IMF at every
opportunity. In Argentina, for example, the more Néstor Kirchner stands up to
the IMF, the more popular he becomes. In Venezuela, Chávez has won every
election or referendum he has fought. In Uruguay, the Frente Amplio has the
first parliamentary majority for any party since 1966 and in 2004 its
presidential candidate, Tabaré Vázquez beat the discredited, pro-US Jorge
Batlle out of sight. In Bolivia, Morales has won a huge victory on a huge
turnout.
Whether
these victories have been won by parties or candidates from the traditional
left or whether they have been won by a Chávez or a Morales, they have been won
using the rhetoric of the sovereignty of the nation state, pitted against the
USA, its local agents (the oligarchy) and the international financial bodies,
which are seen as being US-controlled anyway. The struggle is now against the
privatisation of the state, or for the ‘nationalisation’ of the state, hence
the huge support in Bolivia for the nationalisation of gas, the bedrock of
support in Venezuela for the measures taken by Chávez, and the vote in
Uruguay’s referendum for the right to have access to clean water to be
guaranteed by the constitution. This is not simply patriotism. Even the
multi-class, bourgeois dominated, social formation of the nation-state enjoys
more legitimacy than the unaccountable financial institutions or the
‘democratic’ USA ever will.
This
development should make Marxists look again at the relationship between
national struggles and the class struggle. The issue of the relative weight of
national and class struggle in the socialist revolution in any given country
has been a matter of controversy among Marxists for decades, particularly in
the more ‘developed’ countries in Latin America, such as Argentina. Yet the
hyenas of the ‘Washington consensus’ do not discriminate. All countries have
been devastated. The assault on Argentina was possibly the most dramatic,
perhaps because people there had further to fall. Suddenly, in a country with
food resources to feed 300 million, levels of childhood malnutrition were
soaring, and 58 per cent of the population were on or below the poverty line.
Doesn’t this mean that the various descriptions of nations such as
‘semi-colony’ or ‘state of intermediate capitalist development’ now look a
little academic? If any government in the continent chooses, in line with an
electoral mandate, to implement a progressive taxation system, to redistribute
wealth from the rich to the poor, and to opt out of the ‘war on drugs’ and the
‘war on terror’ they become, in Donald Rumsfeld’s sinister understatement,
‘worrisome’ and for that reason alone, deserve solidarity. (In the same way,
socialists’ solidarity with Cuba should not be conditional on whether they
regard it as socialist, but should simply be a defence of Cuba’s economic
independence).
Anyway,
back to Bolivia. Although Morales does not come from the workers’ movement or
the traditional left, still less the revolutionary left, and although his
programme might be described by the more desiccated, pedantic ‘Marxists’ as
merely ‘populist’, Marxists should see his victory and the process it
represents not just as a worthy, supportable alternative to socialist
revolution (although nothing more than that) but as what it really is, a
flashpoint in the international class struggle against the assault of
neo-liberalism. We should see events in Bolivia, as well as Venezuela, as part
of the international class struggle, even though that struggle is presented by
Morales, Chávez and their supporters in national terms.
The
national struggle in Bolivia, the struggle against the political domination of
the country by the USA, against the pillaging of its natural resources by
multinationals, against an economic system which makes most Bolivians poor, is
an expression of, or a form taken by, the class struggle on an international
scale – a struggle for economic and political power, a struggle for control
over resources, for control over lives, between labour and capital. This does
not mean that there is never class conflict between Bolivians. Of course there
is. But ultimately, for all its talk about the ‘patria’, the Bolivian oligarchy
is defined by, and depends on, its relationship to US and European capital.
Bolivia’s subservient relationship to Europe and North America has made the
country what it is. Unfortunately, it is not possible like filleting a fish, to
take out the ‘national’ parts of the conflict, leaving only the ‘pure’ class
politics, which we feel we can deal with. We have to deal with the whole
struggle as a totality, and the ‘national’ element of the struggle will never
be truly over until Bolivia is no longer threatened as a nation, in other
words, until the defeat of imperialism worldwide.
Of
course, there is also class struggle on another level, the struggle by the
working class for hegemony over the national movement and the national
struggle. This is a struggle to determine which class’s interests best
represent the interests of the nation as a whole, which class has the least
stake in the existing order, which class can best achieve real, not illusory,
independence. The fact that the national bourgeoisie will ultimately sell out
because they fear the workers and peasants more than the imperialists does not
hand hegemony over the national struggle on a plate to the working class. It
has to be fought for. If it is not fought for, then the movement will be left
to the bourgeoisie. In practical terms, the more the Bolivian left stands with
Morales, the more it tries to engage with him, push him to the left, and
counter the influence of right-wingers in the government, the more it promises
to defend him, arms in hand if necessary, against reaction, the more difficult
it will be for those to Morales’s right to influence him. The less sectarian
the left is, the more chance there is that real gains can be made, so that the
revolution which starts out as a democratic, anti-imperialist revolution can
‘grow over’ into a socialist revolution.
The
precise form taken by that ‘growing over’ is difficult to predict, and we
should not try too hard. History is full of surprises and those expecting a
re-run of October 1917 in Russia are likely to be just as disappointed as those
hoping that the high Andes will resemble the Sierra Maestra of the 1950s.
Events in Venezuela question, for example, the assumption that a traditional
‘vanguard’ party is required to lead the masses.
The
administration could start by taking over those enterprises threatened with
closure by their owners and handing them over to their workers, or, as in
Venezuela, the state retaining 51 per cent ownership and the workers 49 per
cent. The Morales administration will at some stage have to neutralise the
armed forces in some way, either by splitting them, as in Venezuela, or by
developing a rival centre of power. Morales will have to trust the masses to
defend him by arming them, and moves will have to be made against strategically
important sectors of capital, so that these are nationalised under workers’
control. Ultimately, the apparatus of the state, which serves the interests of
the oligarchy and the multinationals, will have to be replaced by a state serving
the interests of the workers’ and peasants’ organisations. As to when and how
these things happen, this will depend on the course taken by the class struggle
in Bolivia and beyond.
Of course, the idea that it is possible to build
socialism in a single country is as absurd now as it has ever been, and even
more so in the case of Bolivia, poor and landlocked as it is. The new Bolivia
has a job on its hands to avoid strangulation at birth, let alone developing
the economic and political space it needs. The only way to guarantee the gains
made in Bolivia is to export them, and, paradoxically, the only way to maintain
the defence of the Bolivian nation state is for it to be absorbed, on its own
terms, into something wider. How can this be done? Faced with a similar
problem, Castro’s Cuba attempted what later proved to be a politically
contradictory twin-track approach: unsuccessful attempts to replicate the Cuban
revolution elsewhere in Latin America, and taking the Kremlin’s shilling,
leading to the politically disastrous Cuba missile crisis and, once the
guerrilla movements had been wound down, full integration into the Soviet bloc.
This may have prevented Cuba from collapse, but at the cost of an inevitable
bureaucratisation, the low point of which was Castro’s support for Brezhnev’s
invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Morales has a somewhat different set of choices.
There is no Soviet Union, but already the relationship with Venezuela and Cuba
promises to be mutually beneficial.
Bolivia’s economy has always been dominated by
mining. In 2004, 40 per cent of Bolivia’s export earnings came from a
combination of gold, tin, zinc, silver, lead, antinomy and tungsten. Bolivia
has substantial reserves of these. Morales needs to rebuild COMIBOL, the state
mining company which was virtually destroyed in the 1990s, in order to take
advantage of the competition for these resources between the USA and Europe on
the one hand, and China and other Asian economies on the other, and negotiate
increased benefits for the state. Regarding gas reserves, it is not enough that
just the deposits are nationalised. The gas has to be Bolivia’s all the way to
the border, and there has to be someone on the other end who will buy it.
Therefore, simply to ‘expropriate’ it at one end won’t necessarily achieve
anything. Developing a regional market for gas which is not based on ‘looting
and stealing’ is therefore important. The problem is the present dependence on
Brazil, the most right-wing of the ‘left’ governments elected in South America.
The answer may be the Venezuela-led pipeline project, linking the Caribbean
with the southern cone.
As for agriculture, which consists mainly of coca,
coffee and soya, the administration needs to develop policies, including
credit, research and development, and marketing, to increase in a sustainable
way the use of the land available for cultivation, without resorting to the
environmentally destructive solution of huge-scale soya cultivation for
European markets.
Crucial for Bolivia’s survival could be ALBA, the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, being built by Cuba and Venezuela. Its
aim is to build a 21st-century version of the integrationist project of the
fighter for South American independence, Simón Bolívar. It stands for economic
integration based on co-operation, social justice, opposition to
neo-liberalism, and the redistribution of wealth created from nationally
controlled resources. It is an attempt to build a positive alternative to the
hopefully doomed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the projected Alaska
to the Andes playground for US corporations. Morales may find some breathing
space, and ALBA scope for expansion, depending on the results of elections in
Mexico and Peru and the course taken by events in Brazil and Argentina. In the meantime,
the USA will use ‘free trade’ deals to try to peel away from this process the
peripheral, less ‘worrisome’, states, leaving Cuba, Venezuela and possibly
Bolivia isolated.
These are hopeful times for Latin America. Just over 30 years after Chile became a blood-spattered laboratory for neo-liberalism, across the continent workers and peasants are saying that they have had enough of a system that makes them poor, and they want a society which is organised differently. They are the living contradiction to the belief of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that there is no other way to organise society. In his exultant response to the attempted coup against Chávez, foreign office minister Dennis McShane clearly spoke for the British government, preferring as it did the judgement of the neo-cons in the White House and the Venezuelan elite to the poor on the streets of Caracas. Socialists in Britain have therefore every reason to feel heartened by events in Bolivia. Too often in the past we have had to organise solidarity with the workers and peasants of Latin America in the wake of their defeat. For a change, we can do so in the real hope of their victory.