Is Socialism Being Built in Bolivia?
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 9, 2010
As part of the process of reconceiving our own undertsanding of communist politics we are looking at and encouraging investigation, study, discussion and debate on a wide range of contemporary experiences that identify themselves as socialist or communist. A number of these are taking place in Latin America. One such experience is that taking place now in Bolivia.
from NACLA
Comunitarian Socialism in Bolivia
by Roger Burbach
When Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, was sworn in to a second term in January, he proclaimed Bolivia a plurinational state that would construct “communitarian socialism.” In an accompanying address, Vice President Álvaro Garcia Linare, envisioned a “socialist horizon” for Bolivia, characterized by “well-being, making the wealth communal, drawing on our heritage . . .” The process “will not be easy, it could take decades, even centuries, but it is clear that the social movements cannot achieve true power without implanting a socialist and communitarian horizon.”
During the past decade Latin America has become a scene of hope and expectations as its leaders and social movements have raised the banner of twenty-first century socialism in a world ravished by imperial adventures and economic disasters. Proponents of the new socialism assert that it will break with the state-centered socialism of the last century, and will be driven by grassroots social movements that construct an alternative order from the bottom up. There is also widespread concurrence that the process will take a unique path in each country, that there is no single model or grand strategy to pursue.
The new socialism has been characterized by a much slower and transitory process than the revolutionary socialism of the past century, which was based on the overthrow of the old regime, with a vanguard party seizing control of the state and moving quickly to transform the economy. A different scenario is occurring in Latin America where new governments take control politically, with the previous economic system largely intact. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where the socialist discourse is the most advanced, constituent assemblies were convened to draft new constitutions that restructured the political system and established broad social rights. The process and pace of transforming their economies has become the task of the political and social forces acting through the new legislative assemblies and the “refounded states.”
In Bolivia, the struggle for a constitutional assembly and a new constitution was particularly strife-ridden as the oligarchy, centered in the resource-rich lowland area of the country, engaged in an outright rebellion with the tacital backing of the U.S. Embassy. Little was heard of socialism in this period, in spite of the name of Morales’s political party, Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).
Now, with the consolidation of the new political system and the plurinational state, socialism has been placed on the agenda. In a number of public addresses and interviews, Vice President Garcia Linare and Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca have articulated what they envision as the Bolivian road to socialism.
Garcia Linare, a member of an armed guerilla movement in the early 1990s, who was captured and imprisoned for four years, now asserts that “in Bolivia we are working and betting on the democratic path to socialism. It is possible . . . because socialism is fundamentally a radical democracy.” He goes on to add: “The constitution provides the architecture for a state constructed by society and it defines a long path in which we participate in a process of constructing a new society, peacefully and democratically.”
Noting the uniqueness of the Bolivian process, the vice president states: “Bolivia is inserted in planetary capitalism, but it is different from other societies . . . community structures have survived in the countryside, in the high lands, the low lands, and in some parts of the cities and the barrios that have resisted capitalist subjugation.” He adds, “This is different from American and European capitalism, and it gives us an advantage.”
David Choquehuanca, in an interview, elaborated on the communal roots that facilitate the construction of socialism: “We have always governed ourselves in our communities. This is why we maintain our customs, perform our own music, speak our own Aymaran language, in spite of a 500-year effort to erase these things – our music, our language, and our culture. In a state of clandestinity, we have upheld our values, economic forms, our own types of communitarian organization, which are all being reappraised now. This is why we are incorporating into socialism something that has survived for 500 years — the communitarian element. We want to build our own socialism.”
He added: “In the communities, we always had our ulacas (assemblies), where debates took place. Those political spaces are being recovered. I don’t know if this can be called the seeds of a people’s government. What existed, what exists, is being reappraised, is beginning to be valued and developed. These are the times we’re in.”
Choquehuanca also described the contemporary communities, and the unions that exist both within them and outside of them: “We organize ourselves in the communities. In Bolivia there must be around ten thousand communities, and in each community there is a union of campesino workers. Each union has a base that is associated first on a provincial level, and then on a departmental and national level. The national level is the Sole Union Confederation of Campesino Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB). They are not naturally existing organizations, but organizations that helped allow us to assert our demands and participate in elections. There are several organized sectors with similar structures, such as the teachers, the miners, the indigenous groups, women, factory workers. And we have a mother organization, which is the Bolivian Workers Central (COB). These are the people’s organizations. President Evo Morales has called for strengthening them, since they are the agents driving this process of change.”
Some are skeptical of Morales’ commitment to socialism. Jim Petras, a Marxist scholar who has written on Latin American politics for half a century, asserts that Morales gives a “high priority…to orthodox capitalist growth over and above any concern with developing an alternative development pole built around peasants and landless rural workers.” This, he says, has led to “the increased size and scope of foreign owned multinational corporate extractive capital investments.”
From an ecological perspective, others like Marco Ribera Arismendi proclaim: “We have changed the discourse, but not the model.” A member of the Environment Defense League, one of Bolivia´s largest environment organizations, Ribera adds, “We had great hopes in this government to solve or make a change on these issues,” but it has instead followed an extractive industry model that is driven by transnational capital.
While it is true that Morales has not launched a full assault on capital, his government, along with the other new left governments in Latin America, have ended the neoliberal era in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed free market policies, severely curtailing social spending, and enabling transnational corporations to gain unprecedented control of the region’s nonrenewable resources. Now, many of these governments are using the state to exert greater control of the economy, and are renegotiating the terms of investment in order to capture a greater portion of the revenue for social programs and to facilitate internal development and industrialization.
Morales, soon after taking office in 2006, moved against the foreign-owned natural gas and petroleum companies to take 50% of the revenues, and to make the state-owned petroleum company the administrator and, in some cases, a co-investor. Similar deals have been made with transnational capital in the iron-mining sector, and the government is in the process of negotiating state-dominated agreements for the exploitation of Bolivia’s huge lithium deposits.
Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, who previously served as the representative on trade and economic integration issues, summed up the government’s policy: “We need foreign investment. The issue is the rules under which we are going to allow this foreign investment—how much they are going to leave for the country, how much they are going to have as profit, who is going to own it, the transfer of technology, the transformation of raw materials inside the country. Those are the key issues that Bolivia has synthesized into the words ‘When it comes to foreign investment, we don’t want bosses; we want partners.’ If they can accept that rule, they are welcome. We will no longer accept the relations that we had before.”
The process of transforming Bolivia’s social and economic institutions will be the task of the legislative branch, which will be drafting more than100 bills to implement the provisions of the country’s new plurinational constitution. Of central importance is the empowerment of the indigenous communities, and granting them the economic resources to construct communitarian socialism. The existing agrarian reform law will be revisited. According to Victor Camacho, the Vice-Minister of Land Issues, “we are going to re-territorialize the indigenous communities,” recognizing that the ancestral communal lands have been seized from the indigenous peoples since the conquest.
While advancing at a rhythm that reflects the country’s particular correlation of social and political forces, the Bolivian experiment is contributing to the resurgence of socialism on a global level. As Vice President Garcia Linares declares: “The society we have today in the world is a society with too many injustices, too much inequality . . . We have the seeds of communitarian socialism, badly treated, partially dried up, but if we nourish this seed in Bolivia a powerful trunk will grow with fruit for our country and the world.”
For Evo Morales, the necessity for socialism is global and urgent, given the state of the planet. “If capitalism produces crises in the financial system, in energy, in food, in the environment, in climatic change, then what good is this capitalism that brings us so many crises? . . What is the solution? I am convinced that it is socialism, for some socialism of the twenty-first century, for others communitarian socialism.”
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a frequent contributor to NACLA.
Carl Davidson said
Every successful socialism broke with the prevailing orthodox model. Lenin broke with Kautsky, Tito,and Mao broke with Stalin, Kim Il Sung broke with Mao as did Hoxha, and the Vietnamese charted their own path as well, led by Ho, Le Duan and Trong Chinh. Likewise with Fidel in Cuba. They all had their problems and strong points. As Lenin often fondly quoted from Goethe: ‘Theory is gray, but life is green.’
celticfire said
I think this is some important stuff for Maoists to think about.
The powerful social movements in Latin America have challenged a lot of our presumptions about the “evolutionary road” to socialism, but in many respects also validated some of the important lessons.
While during the Bush years, Hugo Chavez and the Latin Left was a welcomed voice in the darker period of invasions and repression, it is clear that Venezuela is still bound economically to the imperialist network and has not found a way to break free.
However, I wonder if a country like Nepal if it found itself in a post-(semi)capitalist life, how far could it break with the IMF,WTO and the hoards of ngos? How?
At the heart of the Latin American socialism I think we see the obvious problem of how the masses themselves take part in revolutionizing society. The following comes to mind:
1) It is dogmatic and ridiculous (imho) to simply write off Venezuela, Bolivia, etc. as social democracies. They have in practice a different nature than our experiences with social democracies of the 20th century.
2) That said, all these experiments have obvious and glaring limitations: the petrol dollars in Venezuela and how far you can push that, constant harassment and threats from imperialism and forces of reaction, etc. As we know, the US can come in at its will and knock you out with force and leave behind a much more despotic evil than was initially defeated by the Leftist election victories.
3) How much of this “evolutionary” based – that is electorally, socialism protect itself from attack ratification from right wing forces? How can it actually economically transform society while operating it the parameters of a system built by a ruling class?
Its been mentioned before that if Nepal finds itself on the other side of dual power (I mean a socialist victory) who would be its international allies?
Looking around the globe the answer seems logically the Latin American Left.
However, the Latin American Left will I believe rather soon to forced against a wall, and will have to make harder choices in conditions harshly opposed to it. At those junctions, I hope the masses are armed and organized.
Mike E said
The post and this thread might better be phrased “How do events in Bolivia and Venezuela prepare the ground for socialism?”
Many things are needed for a socialist transition: for one thing, growing numbers of people have to actively want it — and ultimately be prepared to fight and die for it (defend the revolution, defend the country, identify and resist opposing forces). There has to be a leadership whose strategic goal is actually to “go there” — and not to “go somewhere else, in the name of socialism.” there has to be a positive alignment of objective internal and external forces. And then you need to actually make the revolution.
Making the revolution should not (as several peole are pointing out) be conceived in a stereotypical or formulaic way (as if there are “two models” and anything else is bogus).
But it is true (as Mao said) that without a peoples army the people have nothing. It is true (as Lenin said) that without state power, all else is illusion.
These two pithy insights are (I believe) true. And they are a warning to those (like Marta Harnecker) who may start to perceive the “administrative” footholds of radicals as some new pathbreaking road to socialism. (There were always those who thought the colonel’s coups of central Africa, or the 1970s left military of Peru as a quasi-socialist event — without a peoples army, and often without a consciously radical ferment at the base). Regardless of the socialist ideas (which may or may not be circulating among the “administrators”) — there are objective facts about power (economics, military affairs, external intrigues) that require an armed and conscious people, who are straining for and then exercising power (through the mediations of representation at both national and local levels).
I think it is tiresome and relatively worthless to approach Venezuela this way: Chavez is not a communist (of our kind), his program is representative of radicalized sections of the middle classes and national bourgeoisie,his governing coalition is an alliance of radicalized intellectuals with sections of the old capitalist apparatus that are energized and pressured by mobilizations from below, his economics is rooted in the welfare capitalism typical of social democrats, Venezuela is not fundamentally breaking from the imperialist chain, so therefore these events are irrelevant to socialism in Latin America.
There is truth to the statement above, except for the last part (which is, of course, its operative and fatal leap).
In fact, the ferment, ideas, experiences of these important upheavals (in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia) are the pre-history of whatever follows. If you want to know where the “revolutionary people” (tomorrow’s potential leaders, cadre and activists of a more thoroughgoing socialist revolution) might be found it is in the ranks of these current movements. People are going through a process.
And it is not just the process of a “false road” — in which the only lessons are negative.
The politics of Venezuela and Bolivia have been profoundly changed by the unprecedented emergence of non-white people (i.e. the working people) as a significant player of first rank. The dominant ideologies and assumptions of the society, the expectations of the people, are being transformed in ways that impact (and in some ways may prepare) the ground for far more radical movements.
It is fine to raise the question of whether these countries are becoming socialist without a peoples army, without some revolutionary movement when power is seized and the old is knocked down. Is there a relatively peaceful transition happening (through elections, through non-violent tests of power, through the defeat of coups, through the vigilance at the base). I tend to think this is not the case — that we have seen a series of nationalist governments (over a long time) in resource rich countries who built quasi-independent policies and popular support based on sharing some of the wealth from oil (Libya) or tin/cocoa (Bolivia)etc. And I don’t think we should equate that to socialism (and I don’t think should lower our sights on what is possible and needed in the world). Wealth sharing, local mobilization, benefits, more education and housing, symbolic respect for the indigenous, even forms of “workplace democracy” of a certain kind — these are all advances, but they are precisely characteristic of social democracy (as well as true for currently-non-existent socialism).
* * * * * * *
It is true (as CelticFire says) that a new revolutionary state in the world will need allies. And (inevitably) one of the options for alliances will be with such movements in Latin America. Frankly, socialist states have never simply sought allies among only the “rogue states of the moment” or revolutionary movements within the imperialist system. They have also sought (at various times) to “make use of contradictions among the enemy” and make connections (of various kinds) with powerful imperialist/capitalist states — including Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Britain and France after the rise of Hitler, a non-aggression pact with Germany briefly in the late thirties, (of course) the global alliances with the Anglo-American powers against the Axis, and then (in the case of Socialist China) an “opening” to the U.S. in the 70s to counterbalance direct Soviet military threats.
So when Celticfire writes:
The answer includes (as the Nepalis have said, and as CelticFire suggests) countries like Venezuela and Bolivia and Cuba etc. But they are also likely to use nearby capitalist China to counter a much more threatening India. (After all, Latin America is very far away from Nepal and its problems).
So again, dismissing (or ignoring) these important churning movements and power shifts simply because they don’t “fit the model” is infantile (and tiresome). The events of today (like, say, the great northern expedition in china) set the stage and potentially generate the material forces, ideas and framework for transitions to more radical forms of popular revolution (i.e. for socialist ones). And if we want to carry out our international responsibilities, and if we want to train ourselves to understand how real politics works, and if we want to be able to speak to the huge immigrant communities from Latin America intelligently — we have to go deeply into these events with a truly investigative and revolutionary spirit.
chegitz guevara said
I think there have been two kinds of social democrats: since soc dems who sincerely want to change the world, who are then either overthrown by the capitalist state or back down in the face of capitalist resistance, and the traitors, those who wear the socialist label while carrying out the agenda of the capitalists. I think the colonel’s coups would demonstrate the former. As Comrade Ely notes, their base is so small, it is a simple matter of toppling them (though that wasn’t the case in Finland or Chile, they had a wide social base).
Here, the social democrats didn’t back down in the face of capitalist resistance. We’ve seen in both Venezuela and Bolivia the capitalists attempting to sabotage the economy, and in the latter, an attempted coup d’etat, which would have succeeded if they hadn’t kept Chavez alive (a mistake they won’t make if they get a second chance).
This is different from what we’ve seen before. What we need to to is understand, why? What are the implications of this difference. There are two tendencies in the socialist movement: either fully embrace Evo and Chavez, ala the IMT and DSP of Australia, and to reject it out of hand. I think both miss the point.
I think it’s much more complicated than either extreme. Regardless, however, what a Venezuelan comrade told me a few years ago I think is key. Paraphrasing, he said: ‘Because of Chavez, now everyone in Venezuela is talking about socialism. We will have socialism, with or without Chavez. That is why he is important.’
Miles Ahead said
I think there is another element we cannot ignore, which in some circuituous way dovetails with Chegitz’ last comment.
While say Bolivia and Venezuela (as well as Ecuador) face some different contradictions, more particular to their own situations, the influence politically that they and their leadership has had and exerted on the region (continent, as well as parts of Central America and the Caribbean) is profound. Morales, in particular, has garnered much respect. But mainly Morales, Chavez and Correa have initiated very key conferences/meetings/blow-outs uniting different forces, e.g. Argentina, Chile, even Panama and Mexico, when these events affect the entire region (e.g. Uribe and Colombia’s unified relations with the U.S. and their invasion of Ecuador, or the more recent coup in Honduras.) In other words, they have formed and continue to struggle to form a more cohesive bloc–much of it counter to the U.S. imperialists. They have mounted the worldwide stage in a much more powerful way.
This is not to say that this is a done deal, but something that the U.S. and others, like China, have to reckon with.
On the other hand, just watched an hours’ long program on PBS about how Garcia (!) has turned the Peruvian economy around (his second time around), and how they are in profit mode–mainly exports, and copper. Peru no less, and Garcia even less. But I couldn’t help but think that the likes of Morales and Chavez are taking some cues from the Peruvian/Maoist revolution, both the positive and negative aspects.
TOR said
Chegitz says: ‘Because of Chavez, now everyone in Venezuela is talking about socialism. We will have socialism, with or without Chavez. That is why he is important.’
This is exactly the point and is actually in line with the IMTs perspective despite what you may think. The IMT are not Chavistas, though many allies in the Hands Off Venezuela campaign are.
LongLiveLenin said
It is what the indigenous peoples of Bolivia call it. in other words, Yes!
Avery Ray Colter said
To LLL, I don’t think I’d buy that it’s socialism just because the Bolivians say it is. The point of the question is whether what is being done is consistent with their claims.
As to the lack of a people’s army…. well perhaps as a separate entity that is true, but in both Chavez’s case and in Correa’s just yesterday, there were elements of the existing armed forces which looked at the socialist-leaning leader, looked at his would-be topplers, and bore their arms to defend the leader.