Is Socialism Possible in Bolivia?
THE previous article in this series ended with the observation that since Evo Morales, the 46-year-old President-elect of Bolivia, refers to Fidel Castro as his friend, it might be time for him to take some lessons from the grand old man of the Latin American revolution. Fidel, on his part, sent a long note to Morales after his victory that said in part: "It is the hour of the true discovery of America, of indigenous America, of Black America, of mrestizo America, of the America of Bolivar and Marti... With your victory, a new history is born." Morales responded quickly with a message of his own to the Cuban people in which he promised to join them in the "anti-imperialist struggle", and within 10 days of getting elected he was on his way to Cuba, on a jet sent for him by his "friend".
Fidel took the extraordinary step of receiving him with full honours reserved for a head of state, even though Morales is still just an ordinary citizen and is scheduled to take up the presidency only on January 22. Indeed, the two men went much further and signed a series of agreements that will come into effect immediately after Morales is sworn in. In all, the two are said to have spent 15 hours having one-to-one conversations, in which Hugo Chavez joined by phone. Meanwhile, Morales has announced two different ceremonies for his assumption of the presidency, an official one and another with the masses who shall be converging on the capital city of La Paz. Fidel has been invited to both.
Under the terms of the Cuba-Bolivia agreement, Cuba will provide technical and human resources for a literacy campaign to be launched in July. Morales announced that the literacy campaign will focus specially on women in the countryside.
"In a year and a half we plan to teach everyone in Bolivia how to read," he said. "It's not possible that in the third millennium there continue to be illiterates in Bolivia. The state has neglected peasant women." Cuba further pledged full scholarships for 5,000 medical students in the next two years and will also set up three eye clinics with all necessary equipment, supplies and personnel to offer free services to Bolivians who cannot afford the services of eye doctors and surgeons. This is an expansion of a programme that was an initiative originally with Venezuela and is being taken to other Latin American countries. Referring to Che, who gave his life for the Bolivian revolution, Morales said that this new agreement between the two countries was a result of the struggle of the Cuban people, and especially the struggle waged by Che Guevara: "Without that seed, the struggle for change of the Bolivian people would not have been possible."
Morales addressed Fidel as el commandate and is known to have referred to him and Chavez in the past as the "two commanders of the Latin American revolution". So, after returning to his hometown for the New Year celebrations, he set out for a tour of half a dozen countries and began the tour with a visit to Venezuela where he and Chavez signed a comprehensive cooperation plan, which included a barter deal whereby Venezuela would supply all the diesel fuel needed by Bolivia, approximately 150,000 barrels a month, in exchange for Bolivian agricultural products, which Venezuela shall use for building its strategic reserves. In effect, the diesel is actually a gift, indicating to the United States that, unlike the 1950s, when the Bolivian revolution was throttled and co-opted owing to the country's acute dependence on U.S. corporate power, no such economic siege shall now be permitted.
Morales shall be visiting about half a dozen countries, including South Africa, and will conclude this tour with a visit to Brazil, where the whole question of Bolivia's own oil and gas shall undoubtedly come up, since the Brazilian corporation, Petrobras, has substantial stakes in Bolivian reserves while Morales is committed to either nationalising or, at the very least, radically revising the terms of agreement with all foreign corporations operating in Bolivia. His encounter with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shall be watched closely around the world since, in effect, Morales has the fundamental choice to make after he becomes President: he can either intensify his relations with the revolutionary camp of Fidel and Chavez, or he can gradually abandon the revolutionary programme he espouses and go the way of Lula, who has betrayed every promise with which he had once assumed the Brazilian presidency. By the same token, the victory of Morales in Bolivia and the shift towards the Left across Latin America, not to speak of his own dwindling credibility within Brazil, puts enormous pressure on Lula himself to retrace his steps back to the Left. The level of solidarity he now shows toward Bolivia shall be an acid test for him.
Responding to this situation, the U.S. corporate media has showed signs of panic at the ascendancy of Morales but has also taken to drawing a distinction between the "demagogic Left" (Cuba and Venezuela) and the "responsible Left" (the governments of Brazil, Argentina and Chile). Thus, The Wall Street Journal of December 23 went on to editorialise: "Sunday's election of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia is more bad news for liberty in Latin America.... The role of Fidel Castro and his apprentice, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in Bolivian politics is no less discouraging. There is some concern that Mr. Morales may be coached to attempt a Chavez redux in Bolivia, consolidating power in a Constitutional Assembly set for July and destroying his political competition under the guise of legality. Whether what is left of Bolivia's fragile democracy can survive a Morales presidency with Chavez as the President's patron remains to be seen.... Brazil will try to make him moderate his approach since its Petrobras is already a big player in the Bolivian gas market. It cannot be lost on Mr. Morales that most of the country's reserves are untapped and without foreign investment will remain so."
Four things about this editorial comment, which appeared the day after the Bolivian election results came out, are remarkable. First, as pointed out in the previous article, no Bolivian President has ever come to power with more than 35 per cent of the vote whereas Morales won 55 per cent. Yet, his election here is said to be "bad news for liberty". Second, the impeccably liberal and democratic promise of seeking constitutional changes through a representative Constituent Assembly is represented here as a "cloak of legality". Third, hopes are pinned on Lula "to make him moderate" and thus save Morales from "coaching" by Chavez and Fidel. And fourth, the hope is that it is the lure of "foreign investment" that will induce that "moderation".
The catch here is that even if the foreign capital that controls Bolivian gas and oil goes on total strike, Venezuela can make up for the shortfall by supplying what Bolivia needs while China has already announced that it is willing to make huge investments in Bolivian oil and gas on terms that Morales is seeking. This is additional to the fact that the single most important demand - virtually, the demand - of the insurgent Bolivian masses that have thrown out two Presidents in two years and who have brought Morales to power is that the oil and gas as well as all other mineral resources be "nationalised". Not nationalising them, and only revising the revenue structure, is already a huge concession Morales is willing to make, and he may or may not be able to carry through even that, considering that he is himself riding a tiger beyond his own control.
The same fear that Latin America is "lurching" not just to the Left but to the "demagogic Left" was expressed editorially by The New York Times on December 24. "During the campaign, Mr. Morales advertised himself as Washington's `nightmare'. He opposes almost everything the Bush team stands for in Latin America, from combating coca leaf production to privatising natural resources and liberalising trade. His favourite Latin leaders are Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba. And the political popularity of these anti-Washington positions is part of a growing regional trend.. .. The political balance in Latin America has clearly been shifting to the Left. Nearly 300 million of South America's 365 million people live under Left-wing governments. While many of these governments, such as Brazil's and Chile's, have worked hard to cooperate with the U. S., others, such as Venezuela's, have gone out of their way to bait Washington. Mr. Morales gives every indication of following the Chavez approach. And there could be similar lurches to the demagogic Left in the numerous Latin American elections soon coming up in places such as Peru, Mexico and Nicaragua." The most important of these elections, from the standpoint of continental shifts, is of course the forthcoming one in Mexico. However, the editorial neglects to mention Chile where too the forthcoming election, between the "moderate Left" and the conservative Right, hangs in the balance. If the "moderate Left" wins there, Latin America shall gain its first woman President and the pressure on Bolivia, a landlocked country, shall be relieved greatly, to the extent that the two enemies of yesteryear may begin negotiating the construction of a pipeline for Bolivian gas to the Pacific coast through territory that was once part of Bolivia but was then forcibly captured by Chile in the 1880s. What is in any case significant about this widespread editorialising in the U.S. is that the electoral victory of Morales, in continental South America's poorest country of a mere 8 million people, is seen not just as a national event but as a key indicator of an ongoing continental shift. Fidel Castro is reported to have remarked privately that the revolution in Venezuela was the first break that Cuba has got in virtually half a century (not Allende's Chile or the Sandinistas' Nicaragua, significantly), and Bolivia is now feared by the U.S. to be heading towards a second such break, with consequences far beyond its own territory.
PRESSURES are already mounting to show Morales the way to "moderation", and there are indeed predictions that he shall go that way. So far, the clearest of such predictions has come from James Petras, possibly the most knowledgeable of the U.S. Leftist scholars working on Latin American affairs. He has worked closely with a variety of Left organisations over almost half a century, including the landless workers' movement in Brazil, and is therefore keenly aware of how leaders elected on platforms of the radical Left, such as Lula, tend to betray their platforms after coming to power. In a hard-hitting essay entitled "The Bankers Can Rest Easy: Evo Morales: All Growl, No Claws?," Petras has urged "an army of uncritical left cheerleaders" to recognise that Morales has always preferred "electoral politics" over "mass movements" and that since 2002, when he lost the presidency by less than two percentage points, he has moved punctually to the Right and has been reassuring national and international business that, as President, he will not depart from neoliberal policies.
Petras makes three essential points: (1) Morales has not participated in the great mass uprisings of 2003 and 2005, used demagogic rhetoric to strengthen his own electoral position while also diverting insurgent sentiments into "institutional channels" (that is, towards elections for the presidency and Parliament). (2) Morales has supported the privatisation of MUTUN, one of the largest iron mining fields in the world, as late as 2005 and has assured "the U.S. Ambassador, Bolivian oligarchs and bankers and the MNCs" that he will neither nationalise any large assets nor revoke previous (largely illegal) privatisations, and will instead welcome foreign investments. (3) His Agrarian Commission has notably failed to come up with any blueprint for agrarian reform and all we know about his promises to "tax the rich" boils down to increasing taxes for the top 1 per cent while leaving the privileges of the rest of the bourgeoisie and the upper middle classes entirely in tact.
James Petras is authentically a man of the Left and undoubtedly detests The Wall Street Journal. Yet, the newspaper's hope, in the editorial we have quoted above, that Lula and the Brazilian corporation Petrobras shall have a "moderating" influence on Morales, finds an interesting and confirming echo in the following words of Petras: "On January 13, 2006, Evo travels to Brazil to discuss with big Brazilian corporations new investments in gas, petrochemicals, oil and other raw materials. According to the Brazilian financial daily Valor (December 26, 2005), Lula will offer state loans and insist that Evo creates a "climate of stability for investments". The giant Brazilian corporation Petrobras pays less than 15 per cent in taxes on the daily extraction of 25 million cubic meters of natural gas, at prices far below international levels. Lula hopes to use "aid" to deepen and extend Brazil's MNC low cost exploitation of valuable energy sources. Meanwhile, gas sold in La Paz is three times more expensive than in Sao Paolo."
It is yet to be seen whether or not Morales will find Lula's pressure unbearable. It needs to be said, however, that (a) two-thirds of the Bolivian population live under what the World Bank defines as the poverty line and the proportion goes up to 75 percent for the indigenous population, (b) Bolivia's gas reserves, equal to those of Kuwait and second only to Venezuela's in Latin America, are the key resource for alleviation of this poverty, (c) that as landlocked country at odds with Chile, Bolivia has only Brazil as its neighbour through whose territory this gas can be exported at all, and Brazilian corporations take full advantage of this fact, and (d) Lula is not the sort of head of state who will cut into the profits of his own MNCs to help out a neighbour. Owing to these stark facts, Morales does not have much of a leverage. Only if the Left wins in Chile and agrees to build an alternative pipeline to the Pacific coast (a big if, given the abysmal historc relationship between Chile and Bolivia) would Morales be in a position to take on the hardships that Brazil is in a position to impose on poor Bolivia.
Immediately upon winning the elections Morales has moved swiftly to have the closest relations with Cuba and Venezuela, but the road is still open for him to retreat into a position less like Chavez and more like Lula. Petras is convinced that Morales is "a moderate social liberal politician who has over the past five years moved to the centre" and his prediction of how Morales is likely to act as President is precise: "He will not nationalise petrol or gas MNCs, but will probably renegotiate a moderate increase on their taxes, and "nationalise" the subsoil minerals, leaving the companies free to extract, transport and market the minerals. He will promote three variants of capitalism: Protection of small and medium-size businesses, invitations to foreign investors and financing of state petroleum and mining firms as junior partners of the MNCs. To compensate and stabilise his regime he will appoint a number of popular leaders to government posts dealing with labour and social welfare with limited budgets who will be subject to the economic and financial ministries run by liberal economists. Morales will promote and fund Indian cultural celebrations. He will promote Indian language use in Andean schools and at public functions. "Land reform" will not involve any expropriations of plantations but will involve colonisation projects in unsettled or uncultivated lands. Coca farming will be legalised but reduced to less than half an acre a family. Drug trafficking will be outlawed. Morales will propose to work with the U.S. DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] against trafficking and money laundering."
Petras of course believes that Chavez himself is just another "populist" leader who is only building capitalism and whose revolutionary rhetoric is buttressed by petrodollars: no petrodollars, no "revolutionary" Chavez. So, one is not surprised at his even lower estimation of Morales. However, if we recall that Lula's election to the presidency in Brazil had raised the same expectations as are now pinned on Morales, one can quite see that someone who has been close to the landless workers' movement in Brazil, and who has closely observed the waxing and waning of revolutionary waves in Latin America over half a century, would have reason to be sceptical.
James Petras' knowledge and commitment are beyond doubt, and cautionary writings in a time of euphoria should be welcome; indeed, his prediction is entirely plausible and may well come true. Moreover, many leaders of Bolivian trade unions and the mass organisations that brought about the insurrections of 2003 and 2005 appear to share this scepticism and have adopted a "wait and see" approach even though the labour rank and file as well as the masses associated with those insurrections have voted enthusiastically for Morales.
BOLIVIA has today become a key ground of contestation in an international debate between those who believe in the primacy of political parties and those who believe in the primacy of `social movements'. In the concrete case of Bolivia, this current ideological struggle is complicated by a number of factors. Historically speaking, there are two major legacies, of communism and Trotskyism, neither of which has any great presence today but which have been very influential in the past and have left indelible marks on today's debates. Within communism, in Bolivia as well the rest of Latin America, there was a prolonged debate whether the revolution shall be socialist to start with or will it have to pass through a national-democratic phase which will then pave the way for a transition to socialism. In the Trotskyst tradition, which was particularly powerful in the 1950s and 1960s and which has survived to this day in much smaller grouping, there always was a great emphasis on organs of popular power, aside from the party (which was regarded as `bureaucratised'), to encircle the state and smash it, as prelude to building a revolutionary state.
These legacies now express themselves in a variety of permutations, even though the social weight of the working class in today's Bolivia is greatly diminished while the vast majority is now comprised of the landless, the subsistence farmers and vast numbers of the immiserated urban poor, with the informal economy greatly overshadowing the formal one.
These legacies of the Left then collide as well as intersect with broader currents of nationalism and populism. Nationalism in Bolivia expresses not only in anti-imperialism directed at U.S. domination, which itself has been perhaps the predominant mass ideology, but also raises the question, inwardly, as to what kind of `nation' Bolivia is and what `national-democratic' would mean. When Morales, for example, speaks of `re-founding' the Bolivian nation, he in implicitly referring to the great economic, political and cultural disinheritance of the indigenous people during both the colonial and republican periods, right up to this day, so that the `nation' is just not there, in the sense that the great majority has never had access to its fundamental rights. Different currents in this ideological struggle take different forms. The predominantly cuturalist trend looks at all this essentially as a matter of "dignity" while the more Leftist current emphasises the issue of economic disinheritance: the issue of culture, language and institutional appointments on the one hand, the issue of nationalisation of natural resources and distribution of land on the other. The fear on the Left is that the election of an indigenous President shall do much more for "dignity" in the abstract cultural sense and in the domain of institutional appointments, but little for radical redistribution of wealth without which "dignity" would have no material basis.
We shall analyse the legacies of the 1952 revolution and the complexities of Bolivian party politics during the subsequent half a century in a future article. Suffice it to say here that this entire period has witnessed a historic dichotomy: all the significant political parties that have dominated Bolivian politics during these years have ossified, fragmented and/or got co-opted, while there have been periodic eruptions of the insurgent masses, particularly over the past decade, which have been either unorganised or have punctually exceeded the dictates and capacities of those who tried to organise them. The insurrections of 2003 and 2005 were led by no one, even though countless `social movements', even aside from the unions, did come up to play their part.
The role of Morales and his "Movement Toward Socialism" have a curious position in all this. Morales of course rose to national prominence not as member of a so-called `social movement' but as a union organiser and eventually the leader of a confederation of cocoa farmers. He founded his `party' in 1995 and, fighting the election as its candidate in 2002, he came close to becoming President. It is this `party' which has now won the presidency with a majority in the key lower house of Parliament, close to a majority in the upper house and three of the nine governorships in the provinces, despite the fact that the Electoral Commission had disqualified close to a million voters (in a country of 8 million people), mostly peasants of Indian origins who were likely to vote almost universally for Morales. Yet, there is an ambiguity. As a political party which seeks power within the constitutional confines (and promises to change the Constitution itself in order to go on ruling constitutionally), it earns the ire of the many of the `social movements' and the suspicion of many others who have been betrayed by parties in the past, including the purportedly Leftist parties. On the other hand, and as the name of he party itself suggests, it is much more of a "movement" than an organised political party - and it certainly is not a party of the working class in the classic sense of that term; in its very make-up it draws much more from traditions of radical populism than from classical socialism. One way of characterising his `movement' would be to say that it combines three quite distinct, though at times overlapping, tendencies: the socialist inheritance of the Left, the various currents of the indigenous aspirations of dignity and economic redistribution, and an incipient desire for a national capitalism relatively independent of foreign domination. Once in power, Morales is likely to try and work in all three directions at once, and only continuing mass pressure, combined with support from Cuba and Venezuela, will then be able to keep him moving in the direction of the socialist Left. The future is very much open.
DURING the months preceding his electoral victory, suspicions were being expressed in many quarters, inside Bolivia as well as outside, that Morales was a man more of rhetoric than of substance. These suspicions are now arising again. And, there are reasons, old and new. Upon his victory, he was congratulated not only by Fidel and Chavez but also Paul Wolfowitz, the disreputable President of the World Bank, who offered aid and help from the Bank with great alacrity. Petrobras in particular but others MNCs as well have promised coperation if Morales does not nationalise their assets and does not demand too radical a revision in existing contracts. After Venezuela, Morales went to Spain, where he did not raise the question of the reparations he says Spain owes to Bolivia for genocide during the colonial period, but, in the words of Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency: "Morales said Wednesday that Spanish President of Government Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero promised to excuse most of Bolivia"s debt. He said the forgiveness of the debt was very promising, especially for education, and added that Zapatero offered agricultural irrigation techniques much needed in Bolivia.... He also promised not to evict, confiscate or expropriate foreign companies, but warned that if they break the law, evade taxes, or embezzle they will be faced with radical measures." (emphasis added throughout.) The main fact here is that the existing "law" in Bolivia, including the law of taxation, is so favourable to the MNCs that they need neither break or evade it.
As noted above, the future is still open and Morales is likely to keep moving in contrary directions until settling down to hard practical choices. Five things need to be said in this uncertain conjuncture.
First, Morales should be given the benefit of the doubt. Propaganda against him as a fire-eating apprentice of Fidel and Chavez is so great, the economic situation in Bolivia is so dire, its dependence on the outside world (including "friends" like Lula's Brazil) is so real, the transition so difficult, that he does need to be cautious. As Fidel once said: "Radical in action, moderate in words."
Second, when Chavez first made his appearance on the Venezuelan scene, he was basically just a do-good, Robin Hood-type character. Only over time, step by step, learning from failures and half measures, acting on his own authenticity and ambition to serve his people, did he become a revolutionary; and only in the last few months has he begun to speak of "socialism of the 21st century," lacing his free-wheeling speeches with quotations from Marx, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Che Guevara. In words at least, Morales is already ahead of where Chavez began even though he is clearly in awe of where Chavez now stands.
Third, Morales is not an upstart but a known figure in his country's and continent's politics. Fidel would have never treated Morales, before the elections and after, unless he perceived that Morales was a potential Chavez, heading not an army (like Chavez) but an immense mass movement, larger than any that Allende ever had. The two of them, Fidel and Chavez, have decided to engage with him constructively, offering aid and advice, so that Bolivia gains the breathing space and the material strength to withstand the pressures for cooptation. Meanwhile, Morales has travelled to Cuba on an airplane sent to him by Castro and is currently touring half a dozen countries on an airplane lent to him by Chavez because he has access to no official aircraft until he assumes the presidency officially. The symbolism of Morales arriving in Iran (or France for that matter) on a Venezuelan aircraft registered in the U.S. shall not be lost on anyone.
Fourth, there is no such thing as a revolution without mastering the armed forces. The Bolivian armed forces belong to the Americans and U.S. troops have carried out an exercise on the Paraguayan side of the Bolivian border since Morales won the election. The carrot of the World Bank aid comes with the stick of U.S.-trained armed forces. The great advantage of Chavez is that he is a military man and enjoys the loyalty of the majority of his officers, and even then a U.S.-engineered coup came extremely close to overthrowing him. A story was doing the rounds in Caracas this past summer, to the effect that as the coup unfolded and Chavez felt cornered he called Fidel for advice and Fidel said: "Do anything but do not do an Allende on us." That is an advice pregnant with meaning, and at least one of the meanings is that when you are overwhelmed by the armed might of the enemy, revolutionary suicide is not what you should opt for; just live to fight another day. At least some of the critics of Morales would rather have him commit revolutionary suicide immediately than to live and engage in a long-term battle of great courage and subtlety that would be necessary if a 500-year-old balance of power is to be reversed. What Fidel seems to be counselling Morales is something for which Lenin had a phrase: "revolutionary patience". If Morales still betrays the revolution, so be it.
Fifth, and finally, a point of general analytic import. Since 1989, this author has argued in a number of writings that the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and the allied countries represents a real historic defeat and is bound to have global repercussions for the very kind of revolutions that now take place. Moreover, this defeat has come in a time when the very class structure in great many Third World countries has been transformed beyond recognition. Revolutionary forces in this situation shall not disappear but they will certainly engage in a prolonged period of experimentation, wherever they are strong enough to engage with experiments in new revolutionary forms. Only after a prolonged period of such experimentation shall we really know what form revolutions of the 21st century shall really take, and this experimentation shall involve critical assessment of the revolutions of the 20th century as much as the great socialist revolutions of the 20th century arose only after critically assessing the revolutions of the 19th century. Condemning Morales for not acting in a Bolshevik manner, before he has proved himself worthy of condemnation, is somewhat besides the point; he never claimed to be a Bolshevik or even a Marxist. Fidel, that revolutionary of classical Leninist mould, is right: teach by example and by deed, help along with the experimentation, strengthen the forces of the Left, and keep the international imperialist Right as much at bay as possible. It is only from within the world as it now exists that revolutions of the future shall come.
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